udies it may be well for the inquirer to note
the fact that familiarity with the world about him leads the man in
all cases to a certain neglect and contempt of all the familiar
presentations of Nature. We inevitably forget that those points of
light in the firmament are vast suns, and we overlook the fact that
the soil beneath our feet is not mere dirt, but a marvellous
structure, more complicated in its processes than the chemist's
laboratory, from which the sustenance of our own and all other lives
is drawn. We feel our own bodies as dear but commonplace possessions,
though we should understand them as inheritances from the
inconceivable past, which have come to us through tens of thousands of
different species and hundreds of millions of individual ancestors. We
must overlook these things in our common life. If we could take them
into account, each soul would carry the universe as an intellectual
burden.

It is, however, well from time to time to contemplate the truth, and
to force ourselves to see that all this apparently simple and ordinary
medley of the world about us is a part of a vast procession of events,
coming forth from the darkness of the past and moving on beyond the
light of the present day. Even in his professional work the
naturalist of necessity falls into the commonplace way of regarding
the facts with which he deals. If he be an astronomer, he catalogues
the stars with little more sense of the immensities than the man who
keeps a shop takes account of his wares. Nevertheless, the real profit
of all learning is in the largeness of the understanding which it
develops in man. The periods of growth in knowledge are those in which
the mind, enriched by its store, enlarges its conception while it
escapes from commonplace ways of thought. With this brief mention of
what is by far the most important principle of guidance which the
student can follow, we will turn to the questions of method that the
student need follow in his ordinary work.

With almost all students a difficulty is encountered which hinders
them in acquiring any large views as to the world about them. This is
due to the fact that they can not make and retain in memory clear
pictures of the things they see. They remember words rather than
things--in fact, the training in language, which is so large a part of
an education, tends ever to diminish the element of visual memory. The
first task of the student who would become a naturalist is to