PREFACE.

These essays deal for the most part with Science in Arcady. 'Tis my
native country: for I am not of those who 'praise the busy town.' On
the contrary, in the words of the great poet who has just departed to
join Milton and Shelley in a place of high collateral glory, I 'love to
rail against it still,' with a naturalist's bitterness. For the town is
always dead and lifeless. There are who admire it, they say--poor
purblind creatures--because, forsooth, 'there is so much life there.'
So much life, indeed! No grass in the streets; no flowers in the lanes;
no beetles or butterflies on the dull stone pavements! Brick and mortar
have killed out all life over square miles of Middlesex. For myself, I
love better the densely-peopled fields than this human desert, this
beflagged and macadamised man-made solitude. The country teems with
life on every hand; a thousand different plants and flowers in the
spangled meadows; a thousand varied denizens of pond, and air, and
heath, and copses. Their ways are endless. They attract me far more
with their infinite diversity than the grey and gloomy haunts of the
cab-horse and the stock-broker.

But my Arcady, as you will see, is none the less tolerably broad and
eclectic in its limits. These various essays have been suggested to my
pen by rambles far and wide between its elastic confines. The little
tractate on _Mud_, for example, recalls to mind some pleasant weeks
among the Italian lakes and on the plain of Lombardy. _A Desert Fruit_
owes its origin to a morning at Luxor. _High Life_ had its key-note
struck by a fortnight in the Tyrol. _Tropical Education_ is a dim