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And wherever many closely-allied species occur, there will be found many forms which some naturalists rank as distinct species, and some as varieties; these doubtful forms showing us the steps in the process of modification.
How those creatures know that this part of the Island of Great Britain is the way to their home, or the way that they are to go; that this very point is the nearest cut over, or even that the nearest cut is best for them, that we must leave to the naturalists to determine, who insist upon it that brutes cannot think.
The study of natural history more than that of any other branch of science, seems to be accompanied by unusual cheerfulness and equanimity of temper on the part of its votaries; the result of which is, that the life of naturalists is on the whole more prolonged than that of any other class of men of science.
"Did you hear the dance he led some of the Hottentots on Sunday evening, when we were at the Mission?" "No; what was that?" "Bremen told me of it; I thought he would have died with laughing. You are aware that there is a species of bird here which they call the honey-bird, by naturalists, the Cuculus indicator; do you not remember I showed you a specimen which I was preserving?"
Faster and faster the top swung forward, downward. Then, with a roaring crash which shook the whole mountain-range beneath our feet, it struck the earth and cracked in halves. How can I describe to any one that first meeting between the two greatest naturalists the world ever knew, Long Arrow, the son of Golden Arrow and John Dolittle, M.D., of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh?
Lamarckians and Darwinians, who still made so much noise in the world, ignored him; and no one came now to open the gate behind which was ageing, in obscurity and deserted, "one of the loftiest and purest geniuses which the civilized world at that moment possessed; one of the most learned naturalists and one of the most marvellous of poets in the modern and truly legitimate sense of the word."
Thus, if you took some ordinary black pepper or some hay, and steeped it in water, you would find in the course of a few days that the water had become impregnated with an immense number of animalcules swimming about in all directions. From facts of this kind naturalists were led to revive the theory of spontaneous generation.
The bat, apparently an imperfectly-formed creature, was for a long time a puzzle to naturalists. Fontaine makes it say: "I am a bird; look at my wings! I am a mouse; the mice forever!" Savants, also, used to describe it as a bird provided with hair instead of feathers, and with teeth instead of a bill.
However, I am adding fine specimens to my collection, which will be altogether the finest known of the birds of the Archipelago, except perhaps that of the Leyden Museum, who have had naturalists collecting for them in all the chief islands for many years with unlimited means. Give my kind love to mother, to whom I will write next time. Your affectionate brother, Singapore. January 20, 1862.
The whole subject of animalcular, or rather minute organic, life, has assumed a now and startling importance from the recent researches of naturalists and physiologists, in the agency of such life, vegetable or animal, in exciting and communicating contagious diseases, and it is extremely probable that what are vaguely called germs, to whichever of the organic kingdoms they may be assigned, creatures inhabiting various media, and capable of propagating their kind and rapidly multiplying, are the true seeds of infection and death in the maladies now called zymotic, as well perhaps as in many others.
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