cursory remarks on "Ornithology as a
Branch of Liberal Education," by the late Dr. Adams of Banchory, the
great Greek scholar, in a pamphlet bearing this title, which he read as
a paper before the last meeting of the British Association in Aberdeen.
It is not only interesting as a piece of natural history, and a touching
cooeperation of father and son in the same field--the one on the banks of
his own beautiful Dee and among the wilds of the Grampians, the other
among the Himalayas and the forests of Cashmere; the son having been
enabled, by the knowledge of his native birds got under his father's
eye, when placed in an unknown country to recognize his old feathered
friends, and to make new ones and tell their story; it is also valuable
as coming from a man of enormous scholarship and knowledge--the most
learned physician of his time--who knew Aristotle and Plato, and all
those old fellows, as we know Maunder or Lardner--a hard-working country
surgeon, who was ready to run at any one's call--but who did not despise
the modern enlightenments of his profession, because they were not in
Paulus Agineta; though, at the same time, he did not despise the
admirable and industrious Paul because he was not up to the last
doctrine of the nucleated cell, or did not read his Hippocrates by the
blaze of Paraffine; a man greedy of all knowledge, and welcoming it from
all comers, but who, at the end of a long life of toil and thought, gave
it as his conviction that one of the best helps to true education, one
of the best counteractives to the necessary mischiefs of mere scientific
teaching and information, was to be found in getting the young to teach
themselves some one of the natural sciences, and singling out
ornithology as one of the readiest and most delightful for such a life
as his.

I end these intentionally irregular remarks by a story. Some years ago I
was in one of the wildest recesses of the Perthshire Highlands. It was
in autumn, and the little school supported mainly by the Chief, who
dwelt all the year round in the midst of his own people, was to be
examined by the minister, whose native tongue, like that of his flock,
was Gaelic, and who was as awkward and ineffectual, and sometimes as
unconsciously indecorous, in his English, as a Cockney is in his kilt.
It was a great occasion: the keen-eyed, firm-limbed, brown-cheeked
little fellows were all in a buzz of excitement as we came in, and
before the examination began eve