Robert Cochrane

Four Hundred Animal Stories Robert Cochrane

Four Hundred Animal Stories - SELECTED AND EDITED BY ROBERT COCHRANE - PREFACE - History Branch of the British Museum, from which we make some extracts by way of conclusion. It bears indirectly on our subject, as it gives examples of the influence of a passion for the study of natural Iistory on the youthful mind. Mr Gladstone, in replying to a letter addressed to him by a correspondent on the subject of the Protection of Wild Birds, said I trust earnestly that natural history, with its many branches, is destined to receive a more liberal acknowledgment in our system of education hereafter than Ias heretofore been accorded to it. Mr SeIous, the distinguished African traveller and mighty hunter, once told the boys of Rugby School, of which he was a former pupil, that searching for birds nests and making boyish natural history expeditions had fitted him in a manner for his adventurous career in the interior of Africa. The biggest poacher in the school, however reprehensible his doings were at the time in the eyes of the gamekeeper, became the successful hunter of big game in Zambesia. Let us now hear Sir W. H. Flower on the subject of It is a strange and interesting fact in human nature that among tliousands of boys who do not take the slightest interest in anything pertaining to what is commonly called Natural History, there are here and there, at all events among all cultivated nations, some few to whom it is an absorbing passion, affording more delight than anything else in life. Very often this is only a passing phase, affecting boys chiefly between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, and then entirely dying away but with some it persists through life, naterially modifying the whole course of existence. This curious condition of mind, or idiosyncrasy as physicians call it, is not confined to particular races or nations the Japanese have it as well as Europeans nlld . Americans. Nor is it linited to any particular positioil in the social or educational scale. No one could have had it in a more illtense form than the poor Scotcl-1 shoemaker, Thomas Edward, cllild of some of the humblest people in the land, whose...........