Glaucus | Page 4

is is as yet unknown to you. Your
daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing
"Pteridomania," and are collecting and buying ferns, with Ward's cases
wherein to keep them (for which you have to pay), and wrangling over
unpronounceable names of species (which seem to he different in each
new Fern-book that they buy), till the Pteridomania seems to you
somewhat of a bore: and yet you cannot deny that they find an
enjoyment in it, and are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful
over it, than they would have been over novels and gossip, crochet and
Berlin-wool. At least you will confess that the abomination of
"Fancy-work" - that standing cloak for dreamy idleness (not to mention
the injury which it does to poor starving needlewomen) - has all but
vanished from your drawing-room since the "Lady-ferns" and "Venus's
hair" appeared; and that you could not help yourself looking now and
then at the said "Venus's hair," and agreeing that Nature's real beauties
were somewhat superior to the ghastly woollen caricatures which they
had superseded.
You cannot deny, I say, that there is a fascination in this same Natural
History. For do not you, the London merchant, recollect how but last
summer your douce and portly head-clerk was seized by two keepers in
the act of wandering in Epping Forest at dead of night, with a dark
lantern, a jar of strange sweet compound, and innumerable pocketfuls
of pill-boxes; and found it very difficult to make either his captors or
you believe that he was neither going to burn wheat-ricks, nor poison
pheasants, but was simply "sugaring the trees for moths," as a
blameless entomologist? And when, in self-justification, he took you to
his house in Islington, and showed you the glazed and corked drawers
full of delicate insects, which had evidently cost him in the collecting
the spare hours of many busy years, and many a pound, too, out of his
small salary, were you not a little puzzled to make out what spell there
could be in those "useless" moths, to draw out of his warm bed, twenty
miles down the Eastern Counties Railway, and into the damp forest like
a deer-stealer, a sober white-headed Tim Linkinwater like him, your
very best man of business, given to the reading of Scotch political

economy, and gifted with peculiarly clear notions on the currency
question?
It is puzzling, truly. I shall be very glad if these pages help you
somewhat toward solving the puzzle.
We shall agree at least that the study of Natural History has become
now-a-days an honourable one. A Cromarty stonemason was till lately
- God rest his noble soul! - the most important man in the City of
Edinburgh, by dint of a work on fossil fishes; and the successful
investigator of the minutest animals takes place unquestioned among
men of genius, and, like the philosopher of old Greece, is considered,
by virtue of his science, fit company for dukes and princes. Nay, the
study is now more than honourable; it is (what to many readers will be
a far higher recommendation) even fashionable. Every well-educated
person is eager to know something at least of the wonderful organic
forms which surround him in every sunbeam and every pebble; and
books of Natural History are finding their way more and more into
drawing-rooms and school-rooms, and exciting greater thirst for a
knowledge which, even twenty years ago, was considered superfluous
for all but the professional student.
What a change from the temper of two generations since, when the
naturalist was looked on as a harmless enthusiast, who went "bug-
hunting," simply because he had not spirit to follow a fox! There are
those alive who can recollect an amiable man being literally bullied out
of the New Forest, because he dared to make a collection (at this
moment, we believe, in some unknown abyss of that great Avernus, the
British Museum) of fossil shells from those very Hordwell Cliffs, for
exploring which there is now established a society of subscribers and
correspondents. They can remember, too, when, on the first appearance
of Bewick's "British Birds," the excellent sportsman who brought it
down to the Forest was asked, Why on earth he had bought a book
about "cock sparrows"? and had to justify himself again and again,
simply by lending the book to his brother sportsmen, to convince them
that there were rather more than a dozen sorts of birds (as they then
held) indigenous to Hampshire. But the book, perhaps, which turned
the tide in favour of Natural History, among the higher classes at least,
in the south of England, was White's "History of Selborne." A
Hampshire gentleman and sportsman, whom everybody knew, had

taken the trouble to write a book about the birds and the weeds