THE present Age, which, after all, is a very pretty and pleasant one, is feelingly alive and widely awake to the manifold delights and advantages with which the study of Natural Science swarms, and especially that branch of it which unfolds the character and habits, physical, moral, and intellectual, of those most interesting and admirable creaturesBirds. It is familiar not only with the shape and colour of beak, bill, claw, talon, and plume, but with the purposes for which they are designed, and with the instincts which guide their use in the beautiful economy of all-gracious Nature. We remember the time when the very word Ornithology would have required interpretation in mixed company; and when a naturalist was looked on as a sort of out-of-theway but amiable monster. Now, one seldom meets with man, woman, or child, who does not know a hawk from a handsaw, or even, to adopt the more learned reading, from a heronshaw; a black swan is no longer erroneously considered a rara avis any more than a black sheep; while the Glasgow Gander himself, no longer apocryphal, has taken his place in the national creed, belief in his existence being merely blended with wonder at his magnitude, and some surprise perhaps among the scientific, that he should be as yet the sole specimen of that enormous An ser. The chief cause of this advancement of knowledge in one of its most delightful departments, has VOL. XXX. NO. CLXXXII, been the gradual extension of its study from stale books, written by men, to that book ever fresh from the hand of God. And the second -another yet the same-has been the gradual change wrought by a philosophical spirit in the observation, delineation, and arrangement of the facts and laws with which the science is conversant, and which it exhibits in the most perfect harmony and order. Students now range for themselves, according to their capacities and opportunities, fields, woods, rivers, lakes, and seas; and proficients, no longer confining themselves to mere nomenclature, enrich their works with anecdotes and traits of character, which, without departure from truth, have imbued bird-biography with the double charm of reality and romance. How we come to love the Birds of Bewick, and White, and the two Wilsons, and Montagu, and Mudie, and Knapp, and Selby, and Swainson, and Syme, and Audubon, and many others, so familiar with their haunts and habits, their affections and their passions, till we feel that they are indeed our fellow creatures, and part of one wise and wonderful system! If there be sermons in stones, what think ye of the hymns and psalms, matin and vesper, of the lark, who at heaven's gate sings,of the wren, who pipes her thanksgivings as the slant sunbeam shoots athwart the mossy portal of the cave, in whose fretted roof she builds her nest above the waterfall? Ay, these, and many other blame A less idolaters of Nature, have worshipped her in a truly religious spirit, and have taught us their religion. Nor have our poets been blind or deaf to the sweet Minnesingers of the woods. Thomson, and Cowper, and Wordsworth, have loved them as dearly as Spenser, and Shakspeare, and Milton. All those prevailing poets have been themselves "musical and melancholy" as nightingales, and often from the inarticulate language of the groves, have they breathed the enthusiasm that inspired the finest of their own immortal strains. "Lonely wanderer of Nature," must every poet be-and though often self-wrapt his wanderings through a spiritual world of his own, yet as some fair flower silently asks his eye to look on it, some glad bird his ear solicits with a song, how intense is then his perception, his emotion how profound, his spirit being thus appealed to, through all its human sensibilities, by the beauty and the joy perpetual even in the most solitary wilderness! Our moral being owes deep obligation to all who assist us to study nature aright; for believe us, it is high and rare knowledge, to know and to have the true and full use of our eyes. Millions go to the grave in old age without ever having learned it; they were just beginning perhaps to acquire it when they sighed to think that " they who look out of the windows were darkened;" and that, while they had been instructed how to look, sad shadows had fallen on the whole face of Nature, and that the time for those intuitions was gone for ever. But the science of seeing has now found favour in our eyes; and "blessings are with them and eternal praise" who can discover, discern, and describe the least as the greatest of nature's works, who can see as distinctly the finger of God in the lustre of the little humming-bird murmuring round a rose-bush, as in that of "the star of Jove, so beautiful and large," shining sole in heaven. Take up now almost any book you may on any branch of Natural History, and instead of the endless, dry details of imaginary systems and classifications, in which the ludicrous littlenesses of man's vain ingenuity used to be set up as a sort of symbolical scheme of revelation of the sublime varieties of the inferior-as we choose to call it-creation of God, you find high attempts in a humble spirit rather to illustrate tendencies, and uses, and harmonies, and order, and design. With some glorious exceptions, indeed, the naturalists of the day gone by, shewed us a science that was but a skeleton-nothing but dry bones; with some inglorious exceptions, indeed, the naturalists of the day that is now, have been desirous to shew us a living, breathing, and moving body, to explain, as far as they might, its mechanism and its spirit. Ere another century elapse, how familiar may men be with all the families of the flowers of the field, and the birds of the air, with all the interdependencies of their cha racters and their kindreds, perhap even with the mystery of that in stinct which now is seen workin wonders, not only beyond the pow of reason to comprehend, but of im gination to conceive! Take up, we say, what book y will, and such is its spirit. The for example, are these two unp tending, but enlightened volum "The British Naturalist," by Mudie, which, we need not add, recommend to all students, and much more real knowledge do contain than many ambitious w we could mention made up of w words-words-and words, as fuzionless as chips-chips-c This contribution to natural his he tells us at once, is sanction no name or authority, and pre to no systematic arrangemen does not fear to say that the of authority, and the divisi system, are the bane of study people at large; and is it n add, the people at large, wh people in few should seek struct in the wisdom that the world? True it is, as M says, that the dictum of auth presses the spirit of enquiry, in the divisions of system t are so many, and so scatter the whole cannot be underst were as easy to tell the hour f disjointed movements of a nu watches jumbled together i as to find "how Nature goe the mere dissection of her w "I do not want to hear the of the exhibiter; I want to see the exhibition itself, and that he shall be quiet, and let me study and understand that in my own way. If I meet with any object that arrests my attention, I do not wish to run over the roll of all objects of a similar kind; I want to know something about the next one, and why they should be in juxtaposition. If, for instance, I meet with an eagle on a mountain cliff, I have no desire to be lectured about all the birds that have clutching talons and crooked beaks. That would take me from the book of Nature, which is before me,-rob me of spectacle, and give me only the story of the exhibiter, which I have no wish either to bear or to remem ber. I want to know why the eagle is on that cliff, where there is not a thing for her to eat, rather than down in the plain, where prey is abundant; I want also to know what good the mountain itself does, that great lump of sterility and cold; and if I find out, that the cliff is the very place from which the eagle can sally forth with the greatest ease and success, and that the mountain is the parent of all those streams that gladden the valleys and plains,-I am informed. Nay, more, I see a purpose in it,-the working of a Power mightier than that of man. My thoughts ascend from mountains to masses, wheeling freely in absolute space. I look for the boundary: I dare not even imagine it: I cannot resist the conclusion- This is the building of God.' : "Wherever I go, or whatever I meet, I cannot be satisfied with the mere knowledge that it is there, or that its form, texture, and composition, are thus or thus; I want to find out how it came there, and what purpose it serves; because, as all the practical knowledge upon which the arts of civilisation are founded has come in this way, I too may haply glean a little. Nor is that all wonderful as man's inventions are, I connect myself with something more wonderful and more lasting; and thus I have a hope and stay, whether the world goes well or ill; and the very feeling of that, makes me better able to bear its ills. When I find that the barren mountain is a source of fertility, that the cold snow is a protecting mantle, and that the all-devouring sea is a fabricator of new lands, and an easy pathway round the globe, I cannot help thinking that that, which first seems only an annoyance to myself, must ultimately involve a greater good. "This was the application given to Natural History in the good old days of the Derbams and the Rays; and they were the men that breathed the spirit of natural science over the country. But the science and the spirit have been separated; and though the learned have gone on with perhaps more vigour than ever, the people have fallen back. They see the very entrance of knowledge guarded by a hostile language, which must be vanquished in single combat before they pair." can enter; and they turn away in des That accomplished and philosophic naturalist, Professor Rennie, in one of his dissertations prefixed thological Dictionary of British Birds, to his edition of Montagu's Orniplan of study, according to the mehas lately laid before the public a thod he has pursued in his own researches, which beautifully embodies the spirit of these remarks. So simple is it, that it appears some ingenious friend, to whom he shewed it in manuscript, objected to it that it was no plan of study at all. What is its method? Why this and no more -but then how much! First, to observe a fact or circumstance in the fields, then to endeavour to discover the design it was intended to serve by the great Creator, and subsequently to examine the statements to be met with in books, in order to compare them with what you have actually observed. On this plan, he rightly says, any person with a good naturalist, the first walk he little care may become a tolerably knowledge of books; on the oppotakes in the fields, without much site and too current plan, much study is indispensable to enable any person to master the theory or system, in relation to which the observed facts are supposed to have their whole value and importance. He agrees with the leading rule laid down by the illustrious M. Levaillant, that the principal aim of a naturalist ought to be to multiply observations-that theories are more easy and more brilliant indeed than observations; but it is by observation alone that science can be enriched, while a single fact is frequently sufficient to demolish a system. Levaillant was himself one who preferred reading the page of nature in the woods and fields to the inferior study of cabinets and books-and hence, Professor Rennie observes, he was stigmatized, as another en thusiastic and genuine observer, Audubon, is at present, by cabinet naturalists, as a romancer unworthy of credit. 'Tis ever so. People sitting in their own parlour, with their feet on the fender, or in the sanctum of some museum, staring at stuffed specimens, imagine themselves naturalists; and in their presumptuous and insolent ignorance, which is often total, scorn the wisdom of the wanderers of the woods, who have for many studious and solitary years been making themselves familiar with all the beautiful mysteries of instinctive life. Take two boys and set them respectively to pursue the two plans of study. How puzzled and perplexed will be the one who pores over the "interminable terms" of a system in books, having, meanwhile, no access to, or communion with nature! The poor wretch is to be pitied-nor is he any thing else than a slave. But the young naturalist, who takes his first lessons in the fields, observing the unrivalled scene which creation everywhere displays, is perpetually studying in the power of delight and wonder, and laying up knowledge which can be derived from no other source. The rich boy is to be envied, nor is he any thing else than a king. The one sits bewildered among words, the other walks enlightened among things; the one has not even the shadow, the other more than the substance- the very essence and life of knowledge; and at twelve years old he may be a better naturalist than ever the mere bookworm will be, were he to outlive old Tommy Balmer. In education-late or early-for heaven's sake let us never separate things and words. They are married in nature; and what God hath put together let no man put asunder 'tis a fatal divorce. Without things, words accumulated by misery in the memory, had far better die than drag out an useless existence in the dark; without words, their stay and support, things unaccountably disappear out of the storehouse, and may be for ever lost. But bind a thing with a word, a strange link, stronger than any steel, and softer than any silk, and the captive remains for ever happy in its bright prison-house, nor would it flee away had it even the wings of a dove, for already is it at rest. On this principle, it is indeed surprising at how early an age children can be instructed in the most interesting parts of natural history; and in illustration of that, Professor Rennie aptly quotes a few of Coleridge's beautiful lines to the Nightingale : "That strain again! Full fain it would delay me! My dear babe, Who, capable of no articulate sound,' Mars all things with his imitative lisp, How he would place his hand beside his ear, His little hand, the small forefinger up, And bid us listen! and I deem it wise To make him Nature's child." Compare the intensity and truth of any natural knowledge insensibly acquired by observation in very early youth, with that corresponding to it picked up in later life from books! In fact, the habit of distinguishing between things as different, or of si milar forms, colours, and characters, formed in infancy, and childhood, and boyhood, in a free intercourse and communion with Nature, while we are merely seeking and finding the divine joy of novelty and beauty perpetually occurring before our eyes in all her haunts, may be made the foundation of an accuracy of judgment of inappreciable value as an intellectual endowment. We must all have observed with Professor Rennie, how exceedingly difficult it is for persons arrived at manhood to acquire this power of discriminating objects whose general similarity of appearance deceives a common observer into a belief of their identity; though a little care on the part of a parent or teacher will render it comparatively easy. So entirely is this true, that we know many observant persons, that is, observant in all things intimately related with their own pursuits, and with the experience of their own early education, who, with all the pains they could take in after life, have never been able to distinguish by name, when they saw them, above half-a-dozen, if so many, of our British singing birds; while as to knowing them by their song, that is wholly beyond the reach of their uninstructed ear, and a shilfa chants to them like a yellow-yoldrin. On seeing a small bird peeping out of a hole |