creation, but the product of a long process of evolution. These men were as seeds that had lighted upon a fertile soil. The age was ripe for them. We shall not be unmindful of the brilliant company of their peers, a long procession extending from the past into the present, a glorious muster-roll, including such men as Harvey and Redi, Ray and Réaumur, Pallas and Humboldt, Savigny and Lamarck, De Candolle and Milne-Edwards, Playfair and Barrande, Sedgwick and Lyell, Owen and Huxley, with others too numerous now to mention, all of whom have passed away, but have obligingly left for our benefit inheritors of their inexhaustible industry, their skill in controversy, their lucidity of style, their penetrating insight, and other enlivening gifts of genius.
Auxiliary to the wits of the naturalists, and giving the modern period a substantial advantage over earlier ages, there have been a series of triumphs won by other men's wits, for other purposes and in other domains. Carry back your minds to the almost unthinkable time when printing was unknown, when as yet there was no post office and no freedom of the press, when paper was costly, and when men had to do their travelling without steamers and without railways. You will see that under those conditions naturalists were almost as helpless as monkeys, elephants, dogs, and other sagacious animals which are kept at a low level of civilization because their means of communicating and keeping on record bright and improving ideas are so extremely imperfect.
Work of astonishing accuracy has no doubt often been done by lovers of nature with very simple apparatus, but the modern student will not disown his indebtedness to the perfection of modern appliances, and especially to the improvements in the microscope. These, or rather those who devise them, have progressively been making research more easy, more fruitful, more attractive. The wonder of the thing appeals not only to the man with a purpose, but to the man without one, and in the exaltation of science the concurrence of the idle, the leisurely, the contemplative, is not to be despised. From the law court and the camp, from the ledger and the counting house, men turn sometimes for amusement's sake to Natural History. They find it a delightful and absorbing pastime. That in itself is something. But, though the original motive may have been "to treat an idle subject in
