of Julian
Grenfell and Darwin. And this is no outrageously impossible, but a
very likely and fitting combination. For Julian Grenfell wrote great
poetry even in the trenches in Flanders between the two battles of
Ypres. And with his love of country life, shooting, fishing, and
hunting, his inclination might very easily have been directed
towards natural history. If it had been and the opportunity had
offered, we might have had the very type of Naturalist-Artist we are
now awaiting. He would have had the physical fitness and capacity
to endure hardships which are required for travel in parts of the
Earth where the Natural Beauty is finest, and he would have had, too,
the sensitiveness of soul to receive impressions and the power of
expressing himself so that others might share with him the
impressions he had felt. If after passing through the earlier stages of
shooting and hunting birds and animals he had come to the more
profitable stage of observing them, and had devoted to the
observation of their habits and ways of life the same skill and
acumen which he had shown in hunting them, he might, with his
innate and genuine love of animals, very well have become a great
naturalist as well as what he was--a great sportsman and a writer of
great poetry.

It is for the advent of such Naturalist-Artist that we wait. But we
have to prepare the way for him and do our share in helping to
produce him. And this will now be my endeavour, for it so happens
that I have been blessed with opportunities--some of my own
making, some provided for me--of seeing Nature on a larger scale
and under more varied aspects than falls to the lot of most men. I am
ashamed when I reflect how little use I have made of those
opportunities--how little I was prepared and trained to make the
most of them. But this at least I can do: I can point out to the coming
Artist those parts of the world where he is likely to see the Beauty of
Nature most fully, and in greatest variety.

With this end in view I shall begin with the Sikkim Himalaya, over
which the eagle flew, because it contains within a small area a
veritable compendium of Nature. Rising directly out of the plains of
India, practically within the tropics, these mountains rise far above
the limits of perpetual snow. Their base is covered with luxuriant
vegetation of a truly tropical character, and this vegetation extends
through all the ranges from tropical to temperate and arctic. The
animal, bir