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Show 14 PREFATORY NOTICE. but little. But a guide to " Observation," taken unexplained, is even worse ; for unless it be in the use of instruments and apparatus, I know not how one man can guide another to observe. Means may certainly be taken to tempt a person into the fields : but if he will not use his own senses when he is once there, his case is hopeless. " Hints of Inducement to the Observation of Nature," is, therefore, what I have been reduced to in the execution of the volume, and, consequently, that should be taken as the fair interpretation of the title. Even that is no easy task. Anybody could write a panegyric on nature ; and so could any one who had access to the printed books, and a talent or tum that way, compile a manual of the outlines of Natural History, or of the details of any, or all, of the departments of it. But the first of these would not have accomplished the object which I had in view ; and the second would have defeated that object. Mere panegyric does not put anybody in ., the way of knowing what it lauds; and as for writ- i ing on Natural History, the quantity of that is already out of all measure compared with the observation. There is not an apartment in the densest 1 part of the British ~etropolis in which it would not be possible to " grow" a naturalist, who should utterly confound the sharpest eyed and clearest headed man who ever looked at real nature, and reflected on what he saw. That is merely a fashion, however ; and, like all fashions, it affords no pleasure-, except when it is so worn as to attract public notice. Now, I have no wish to set up PREFATORY NOTICE. 15 nature as a rival to the tailor or the milliner ; and th?refore ! should certainly not willingly do any thing tendmg to make Natural History a matter of mere show. A man who observes nature is not to be supposed to collect an audience every time that he looks abroad upon the earth or upward to the sky, and though ~e. be eve.r so zealous a member of any of the soctehes whiCh have for their object the advancement of his favourite study, it is but rarely that he can have any thing worth communicating even there. So that a man's contemplation of nature is li~e his religion, a subject of personal pleasure t~ htmself; and, as is apt to be the case with religion if he makes too much parade of it before the world he runs some danger ?f losing it. Besides, although there are few occupations more pleasant than rational c?nvers~tions on ~ atural History with friends, especmlly with young fnends, when one can instruct them without appearing to act the schoolmaster ; yet still the sweetest hours of a man's converse with nature are those during which he has it all to himself. It r is then .that the career of thought runs free and far a~ the hgh~ of heaven; and vanity is subdued, and b1tterne~s Is sweetened, and hope is elevated, by the companson of one's own little acquirements and cares, with the mighty expanse around, and of the perfe~t nothingness of this life in respect to that which then nse~ clearly a~d convincingly in the anticipation. . That ts the. feelmg of natural objects which I have wtshed to excite and encourage : if that end could be seen and kept in view, the observation of the facts would be a very easy matter ; and, as every |