endeavored to interest his family in it too. Any books of travel, and
especially of missionary enterprise, that he could lay his hands on, he
eagerly read. Some publications of the Tract Society, called the _Weekly
Visitor_, the _Child's Companion and Teacher's Offering,_ were taken in,
and were much enjoyed by his son David, especially the papers of "Old
Humphrey." Novels were not admitted into the house, in accordance with
the feeling prevalent in religious circles. Neil Livingstone had also a
fear of books of science, deeming them unfriendly to Christianity; his
son instinctively repudiated that feeling, though it was some time
before the works of Thomas Dick, of Broughty-Ferry, enabled him to see
clearly, what to him was of vital significance, that religion and
science were not necessarily hostile, but rather friendly to each other.

The many-sidedness of his character showed itself early; for not content
with reading, he used to scour the country, accompanied by his brothers,
in search of botanical, geological, and zoological specimens.
Culpepper's _Herbal_ was a favorite book, and it set him to look in
every direction for as many of the plants described in it as the
countryside could supply. A story has been circulated that on these
occasions he did not always confine his researches in zoology to fossil
animals. That Livingstone was a poacher in the grosser sense of the term
seems hardly credible, though with the Radical opinions which he held at
the time it may readily be believed that he had no respect for the
sanctity of game. If a salmon came in his way while he was fishing for
trout, he made no scruple of bagging it. The bag on such occasions was
not always made for the purpose, for there is a story that once when he
had captured a fish in the "salmon pool," and was not prepared to
transport such a prize, he deposited it in the leg of his brother
Charles's trousers, creating no little sympathy for the boy as he passed
through the village with his sadly swollen leg!