There are those, I doubt not, among my audience who do not need the advice which I shall presume to give to-night; who belong to that fast increasing class among officers of whom I have often said—­and I have found scientific men cordially agree with me—­that they are the most modest and the most teachable of men.  But even in their case there can be no harm in going over deliberately a question of such importance; in putting it, as it were, into shape; and insisting on arguments which may perhaps not have occurred to some of them.

Let me, in the first place, reassure those—­if any such there be—­who may suppose, from the title of my lecture, that I am only going to recommend them to collect weeds and butterflies, “rats and mice, and such small deer.”  Far from it.  The honourable title of Natural History has, and unwisely, been restricted too much of late years to the mere study of plants and animals.  I desire to restore the words to their original and proper meaning—­the History of Nature; that is, of all that is born, and grows in time; in short, of 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