Glaucus | Page 5

in his
own parish, and the every-day things which went on under his eyes,
and everyone else's. And all gentlemen, from the Weald of Kent to the
Vale of Blackmore, shrugged their shoulders mysteriously, and said,
"Poor fellow!" till they opened the book itself, and discovered to their
surprise that it read like any novel. And then came a burst of confused,
but honest admiration; from the young squire's "Bless me! who would
have thought that there were so many wonderful things to be seen in
one's own park!" to the old squire's more morally valuable "Bless me!
why, I have seen that and that a hundred times, and never thought till
now how wonderful they were!"
There were great excuses, though, of old, for the contempt in which the
naturalist was held; great excuses for the pitying tone of banter with
which the Spectator talks of "the ingenious" Don Saltero (as no doubt
the Neapolitan gentleman talked of Ferrante Imperato the apothecary,
and his museum); great excuses for Voltaire, when he classes the
collection of butterflies among the other "bizarreries de l'esprit
humain." For, in the last generation, the needs of the world were
different. It had no time for butterflies and fossils. While Buonaparte
was hovering on the Boulogne coast, the pursuits and the education
which were needed were such as would raise up men to fight him; so
the coarse, fierce, hard-handed training of our grandfathers came when
it was wanted, and did the work which was required of it, else we had
not been here now. Let us be thankful that we have had leisure for
science; and show now in war that our science has at least not
unmanned us.
Moreover, Natural History, if not fifty years ago, certainly a hundred
years ago, was hardly worthy of men of practical common sense. After,
indeed, Linne, by his invention of generic and specific names, had
made classification possible, and by his own enormous labours had
shown how much could be done when once a method was established,
the science has grown rapidly enough. But before him little or nothing
had been put into form definite enough to allure those who (as the
many always will) prefer to profit by others' discoveries, than to
discover for themselves; and Natural History was attractive only to a
few earnest seekers, who found too much trouble in disencumbering
their own minds of the dreams of bygone generations (whether facts,

like cockatrices, basilisks, and krakens, the breeding of bees out of a
dead ox, and of geese from barnacles; or theories, like those of
elements, the VIS PLASTRIX in Nature, animal spirits, and the other
musty heirlooms of Aristotleism and Neo-platonism), to try to make a
science popular, which as yet was not even a science at all. Honour to
them, nevertheless. Honour to Ray and his illustrious contemporaries in
Holland and France. Honour to Seba and Aldrovandus; to Pomet, with
his "Historie of Drugges;" even to the ingenious Don Saltero, and his
tavern-museum in Cheyne Walk. Where all was chaos, every man was
useful who could contribute a single spot of organized standing ground
in the shape of a fact or a specimen. But it is a question whether
Natural History would have ever attained its present honours, had not
Geology arisen, to connect every other branch of Natural History with
problems as vast and awful as they are captivating to the imagination.
Nay, the very opposition with which Geology met was of as great
benefit to the sister sciences as to itself. For, when questions belonging
to the most sacred hereditary beliefs of Christendom were supposed to
be affected by the verification of a fossil shell, or the proving that the
Maestricht "homo diluvii testis" was, after all, a monstrous eft, it
became necessary to work upon Conchology, Botany, and Comparative
Anatomy, with a care and a reverence, a caution and a severe induction,
which had been never before applied to them; and thus gradually, in the
last half-century, the whole choir of cosmical sciences have acquired a
soundness, severity, and fulness, which render them, as mere
intellectual exercises, as valuable to a manly mind as Mathematics and
Metaphysics.
But how very lately have they attained that firm and honourable
standing ground! It is a question whether, even twenty years ago,
Geology, as it then stood, was worth troubling one's head about, so
little had been really proved. And heavy and uphill was the work, even
within the last fifteen years, of those who stedfastly set themselves to
the task of proving and of asserting at all risks, that the Maker of the
coal seam and the diluvial cave could not be a "Deus quidam deceptor,"
and that the facts which the rock and the silt revealed were sacred, not