n 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. 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 in the eaves, and especially on hearing him
chatter, they shrewdly suspect him to be a sparrow, though it does not
by any means follow that their suspicions are always verified; and
though, when sitting with her white breast so lovely out of the "auld
clay bigging" in the window-corner, he cannot mistake Mistress Swallow,
yet when flitting in fly-search over the stream, and ever and anon
dipping her wing-tips in the lucid coolness, 'tis an equal chance that
he misnames her Miss Marten.

What constant caution is necessary during the naturalist's perusal even
of the very best books! From the very best we can only obtain knowledge
at second-hand, and this, like a story circulated among village gossips,
is more apt to gain in falsehood than in truth, as it passes from one to
another; but in field-study we go at once to the fountain-head, and
obtain our facts pure and unalloyed by the theories and opinions of
previous observers. Hence it is that the utility of books becomes
obvious. You witness with your own eyes some puzzling, perplexing,
strange, and unaccountable--fact; twenty different statements of it have
been given by twenty different ornithologists; you consult them all, and
getting a hint from one, and a hint from another, here a glimmer of
light to be followed, and there a gloom of darkness to be avoided--why,
who knows but that in the end you do yourself solve the mystery, and
absolutely become not only happy but illustrious? 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 pre