much invaluable local information can be only obtained from
fishermen, miners, hunters, and tillers of the soil. Next, he
should be brave and enterprising, and withal patient and undaunted;
not merely in travel, but in investigation; knowing (as Lord Bacon
might have put it) that the kingdom of Nature, like the kingdom of
heaven, must be taken by violence, and that only to those who knock
long and earnestly does the great mother open the doors of her
sanctuary. He must be of a reverent turn of mind also; not rashly
discrediting any reports, however vague and fragmentary; giving man
credit always for some germ of truth, and giving Nature credit for
an inexhaustible fertility and variety, which will keep him his
life long always reverent, yet never superstitious; wondering at
the commonest, but not surprised by the most strange; free from the
idols of size and sensuous loveliness; able to see grandeur in the
minutest objects, beauty, in the most ungainly; estimating each
thing not carnally, as the vulgar do, by its size or its
pleasantness to the senses, but spiritually, by the amount of
Divine thought revealed to Man therein; holding every phenomenon
worth the noting down; believing that every pebble holds a
treasure, every bud a revelation; making it a point of conscience
to pass over nothing through laziness or hastiness, lest the vision
once offered and despised should be withdrawn; and looking at every
object as if he were never to behold it again.

Moreover, he must keep himself free from all those perturbations of
mind which not only weaken energy, but darken and confuse the
inductive faculty; from haste and laziness, from melancholy,
testiness, pride, and all the passions which make men see only what
they wish to see. Of solemn and scrupulous reverence for truth; of
the habit of mind which regards each fact and discovery, not as our