As a botanist I never really shone, but two of us joined an open-air course and used to be taken expeditions into Kew Gardens and such places, where our lecturer explained to his pupils—­all grown-up save ourselves—­the less recondite mysteries.  There was one golden Saturday when we missed the rendezvous at Pinner and had a picnic by ourselves instead; and, after that, many other golden Saturdays when some unaccountable accident separated us from the party.  I remember particularly a day in Highgate Woods—­ a good place for losing a botanical lecturer in; if you had been there, you would have seen two little boys very content, lying one each side of a large stone slab, racing caterpillars against each other.

But there was one episode in my career as a natural scientist—­a career whose least details are brought back by the magic word, caterpillar—­ over which I still go hot with the sense of failure.  This was an attempt to stuff a toad.  I don’t know to this day if toads can be stuffed, but when our toad died he had to be commemorated in some way, and, failing a marble statue, it seemed good to stuff him.  It was when we had got the skin off him that we began to realize our difficulties.  I don’t know if you have had the skin of a fair-sized toad in your hand; if so, you will understand that our first feeling was one of surprise that a whole toad could ever have got into it.  There seemed to be no shape about the thing at all.  You could have carried it—­no doubt we did, I have forgotten—­in the back of a watch.  But it had lost all likeness to a toad, and it was obvious that stuffing meant nothing to it.

Of course, little boys ought not to skin toads and carry geological hammers and deceive learned professors of botany; I know it is wrong.  And of course caterpillars of the puss-moth variety oughtn’t to make faces at timid young thrushes.  But it is just these things which make such pleasant memories afterwards—­ when professors and toads are departed, when the hammers lie rusty in the coal cellar, and when the young thrushes are grown up to be quite big birds.  There are fortunate mortals who can always comfort themselves with a clich‚.  If any question arises as to the moral value of Racing, whether in war-time or in peace-time, they will murmur something about “improving the breed of horses,” and sleep afterwards with an easy conscience.  To one who considers how many millions of people are engaged upon this important work, it is surprising that nothing more notable in the way of a super-horse has as yet emerged; one would have expected at least by this time something which combined the flying-powers of the hawk with the diving-powers of the seal.  No doubt this is what the followers of the Colonel’s Late Wire are aiming at, and even if they have to borrow ten shillings from the till in the good cause, they feel that possibly by means of that very ten shillings Nature has approximated a little more closely to the desired animal.  Supporters of Hunting,