flowers. And if we are discontented with our opportunities, let us read Gilbert White's History of Selborne, or how Darwin watched earthworms for half a lifetime, or how Richard Jefferies saw in the fields and hedgerows of Wiltshire a vision of nature, which seemed every year to grow richer in beauty and marvel. It is thus that the study of Natural History should begin, as it does naturally begin in childhood, and as it began long before there was any exact Zoology,-with the observation of animal life in its familiar forms. The country schoolboy, who watches the squirrels hide the beech nuts and pokes the hedgehog into a living ball, who finds the nest of the lapwings, though they decoy him away with prayerful cries, who catches the speckled trout in spite of all their caution, and laughs at the ants as they expend hours of labour on booty not worth the having, is laying the foundation of a naturalist's education, which, though he may never build upon it, is certainly the surest. For it is in such studies that we get close to life, that we may come to know nature as a friend, that we may even hear the solemn beating of her heart.

The same truth has been vividly expressed by one whose own life-work shows that thoroughness as a zoologist is consistent with enthusiasm for open-air natural history. Of the country lad Dr. C. T. Hudson says, in a Presidential Address to the Royal Microscopical Society, that he "wanders among fields and hedges, by moor and river, seawashed cliff and shore, learning zoology as he learnt his native tongue, not in paradigms and rules, but from Mother Nature's own lips. He knows the birds by their flight and (still rarer accomplishment) by their cries. He has never heard of Edicnemus crepitans, the Charadrius pluvialis, or the Squatarola cinerea, but he can find a plover's nest, and has seen the young brown peewits peering at him from behind their protecting clods. He has watched the cunning flycatcher leaving her obvious and yet invisible young in a hole in an old wall, while she carries off the pellets that might betray their presence; and has stood so still to see the male redstart that a field-mouse has curled itself on his warm foot and gone to sleep."

But the student must also attempt more careful studies of living animals, for it is easy to remain satisfied with vague "general impressions." He should make for himself -to be corrected afterwards by the labours of others-a "Fauna" and "Flora" of the district, or a "Naturalist's Year Book" of the flow and ebb of the living tide. He should select some nook or pool for special study, seeking a more and more intimate acquaintance with its tenants, watching them first and using the eyes of other students afterwards. Nor is there any difficulty in keeping at least freshwater aquaria—simply glass globes with pond water and weeds—in which, within small compass, much wealth of life may be observed. Those students are specially fortunate who have within reach such collections as the Zoological Gardens and the British Museum in London; but this is no reason for failing to appreciate the life of the sea-shore, the moor-pond, and the woods, or for neglecting to gain the confidence of fishermen and gamekeepers, or of any whose knowledge of natural history has been gathered from the experience of their daily life.

1. Variety of Life.-Between one form of life and another there often seems nothing in common save that both are alive. Thus life is characteristically asleep in plants, it is generally more or less awake in animals. Yet among the latter, does it not doze in the tortoise, does it not fever in the hot-blooded bird? Or contrast the phlegmatic amphibian and the lithe fish, the limpet on the rock and the energetic squid, the barnacle passively pendent on the floating log and the frolicsome shrimp, the cochineal insect like a gall upon the leaf and the busy bee, the sedentary corals and the free-swimming jellyfish, the sponge on the rock and the minute Night-Light Infusorians which make the waves sparkle in the summer darkness. No genie of Oriental fancy was more protean than the reality behind the myth -the activity of life.

2. Haunts of Life. The variety of haunt and home is not less striking. There is the great and wide sea with swimming things innumerable, our modern giants the whales, the seals and walruses and the sluggish sea-cows, the flip

pered penguins and Mother Carey's chickens, the marine turtles and swift poisonous sea-serpents, the true fishes in prolific shoals, the cuttles and other pelagic molluscs; besides hosts of armoured crustaceans, swiftly-gliding worms, fleets of Portuguese Men-of-War and throbbing jellyfish, and minute forms of life as numerous in the waves as motes in the sunlit air of a dusty town.

"But what an endless worke have I in hand,
To count the seas abundant progeny,

Whose fruitful seede farre passeth those on land,
And also those which wonne in th' azure sky;
For much more eath to tell the starres on hy,
Albe they endlesse seem in estimation,
Then to recount the seas posterity;

So fertile be the flouds in generation,

So huge their numbers, and so numberlesse their nation."

Realise Walt Whitman's vivid picture :

"The World below the brine.

Forests at the bottom of the sea-the branches and leaves, Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds—the thick tangle, the openings, and the pink turf,

Different colours, pale grey and green, purple, white, and gold— the play of light through the water,

Dumb swimmers there among the rocks-coral, gluten, grass, rushes and the aliment of the swimmers,

Sluggish existences grazing there, suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom :

The sperm-whale at the surface, blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes,

The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sealeopard, and the sting ray.

Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes-sight in those ocean depths -breathing that thick breathing air, as so many do."

The sea appears to have been the cradle, if not the birthplace, of the earliest forms of animal life, and some have never wandered out of hearing of its lullaby. From the sea, animals seem to have migrated to the shore and thence to the land, but also to the great depths. Of the life of the deep sea we have had certain knowledge only

within the last quarter of a century, since the Challenger expedition (1872-76), under Sir Wyville Thomson's leadership, following the suggestions gained during the laying of the Atlantic cables and the tentative voyages of the Lightning (1868) and the Porcupine (1870), revealed what was virtually a new world. During 3 years the Challenger explorers cruised over 68,900 nautical miles, reached with the long arm of the dredge to depths equal to reversed Himalayas, raised sunken treasures of life from over 300 stations, and brought home spoils which for about twenty years have kept the savants of Europe at work, the results of which, under Dr. John Murray's editorship, form a library of about forty huge volumes. The discovery of this new world has not only yielded rich treasures of knowledge, but has raised a wave of wider than national enthusiasm which has not since died away.

We are at present mainly interested in the general picture which the results of these deep-sea explorations present, of a thickly-peopled region far removed from direct observation, sometimes three to five miles beneath the surface a world of darkness relieved only by the living lamps of phosphorescence, of silent calm in which animals grow into quaint forms of great uniformity throughout wide areas, and moreover a cold and plantless world in which the animals have it all their own way, feeding, though apparently without much struggle for existence, on their numerous neighbours, and ultimately upon the small organisms which in dying sink gently from the surface like snowflakes through the air.

Far otherwise is it on the shore-sunlight and freshening waves, continual changes of time and tide, abundant plants, crowds of animals, and a scrimmage for food. The shore is one of the great battlefields of life on which, through campaign after campaign, animals have sharpened one another's wits. It has been for untold ages a great school.

Leaving the sea-shore, the student might naturally seek to trace a migration of animals from sea to estuary, and from the brackish water to river and lake. But this path, though followed by some animals, does not seem to have