f all natural objects.

If anyone shall say--By that definition you make not only geology and
chemistry branches of natural history, but meteorology and astronomy
likewise--I cannot deny it. They deal, each of them, with realms of
Nature. Geology is, literally, the natural history of soils and lands;
chemistry the natural history of compounds, organic and inorganic;
meteorology the natural history of climates; astronomy the natural
history of planetary and solar bodies. And more, you cannot now study
deeply any branch of what is popularly called Natural History--that is,
plants and animals--without finding it necessary to learn something, and
more and more as you go deeper, of those very sciences. As the
marvellous interdependence of all natural objects and forces unfolds
itself more and more, so the once separate sciences, which treated of
different classes of natural objects, are forced to interpenetrate, as it
were; and to supplement themselves by knowledge borrowed from each other.
Thus--to give a single instance--no man can now be a first-rate botanist
unless he be also no mean meteorologist, no mean geologist, and--as Mr.
Darwin has shown in his extraordinary discoveries about the fertilisation
of plants by insects--no mean entomologist likewise.

It is difficult, therefore, and indeed somewhat unwise and unfair, to put
any limit to the term Natural History, save that it shall deal only with
nature and with matter; and shall not pretend--as some would have it to
do just now--to go out of its own sphere to meddle with moral and
spiritual matters. But, for practical purposes, we may define the
natural history of any given spot as the history of the causes which have
made it what it is, and filled it with the natural objects which it
holds. And if anyone would know how to study the natural history of a
place, and how to write it, let him read--and if he has read its
delightful pages in youth, read once again--that hitherto unrivalled
little monograph, White's 'Natural History of Selborne;' and let him then
try, by the light of improved science, to do for any district where he
may be stationed, what White did for Selborne nearly one hundred years
ago. Let him study its plants, its animals, its soils and rocks; and
last, but not least, its scenery, as the total outcome of what the soils,
and plants, and animals have made it. I say, have made it. How far the
nature of the soils and the rocks will affect the sce