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