dukes and princes. Nay, the study is now more than honourable; it
is (what to many readers will be a far higher recommendation) even
fashionable. Every well-educated person is eager to know something
at least of the wonderful organic forms which surround him in every
sunbeam and every pebble; and books of Natural History are finding
their way more and more into drawing-rooms and school-rooms, and
exciting greater thirst for a knowledge which, even twenty years
ago, was considered superfluous for all but the professional
student.

What a change from the temper of two generations since, when the
naturalist was looked on as a harmless enthusiast, who went "bug-
hunting," simply because he had not spirit to follow a fox! There
are those alive who can recollect an amiable man being literally
bullied out of the New Forest, because he dared to make a
collection (at this moment, we believe, in some unknown abyss of
that great Avernus, the British Museum) of fossil shells from those
very Hordwell Cliffs, for exploring which there is now established
a society of subscribers and correspondents. They can remember,
too, when, on the first appearance of Bewick's "British Birds," the
excellent sportsman who brought it down to the Forest was asked,
Why on earth he had bought a book about "cock sparrows"? and had to
justify himself again and again, simply by lending the book to his
brother sportsmen, to convince them that there were rather more
than a dozen sorts of birds (as they then held) indigenous to
Hampshire. But the book, perhaps, which turned the tide in favour
of Natural History, among the higher classes at least, in the south
of England, was White's "History of Selborne." A Hampshire
gentleman and sportsman, whom everybody knew, had taken the trouble
to write a book about the birds and the weeds in his own parish,