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The beloved and battered high hat was put away in a closet and only looked at secretly. State robes had to be worn on all occasions. And when the Doctor did once in a while manage to sneak off for a short, natural-history expedition he never dared to wear his old clothes, but had to chase his butterflies with a crown upon his head and a scarlet cloak flying behind him in the wind.
If he could provide a place where these young men could find entertainment and opportunity to improve their minds, it would be a great gain. Peter Cooper thought that we are educated through the sense of curiosity quite as much as in reading books. So Cooper Union provided a museum of waxworks and many strange, natural-history specimens.
And as if not to be outdone, although he did not then know what Humboldt had said of him, Jefferson declared that Alexander von Humboldt was the greatest man he ever saw. Most of the vast number of rare specimens and natural-history curiosities gathered by Humboldt and Bonpland were placed on a homeward-bound ship that sailed from South America.
But I advocate natural-history knowledge from this point of view, because it would lead us to seek the beauties of natural objects, instead of trusting to chance to force them on our attention. To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country, or sea-side, stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.
There was a library of a couple of dozen of volumes in the district, and I used to take home books from it. They were usually books of travel or of adventure. I remember one, especially, a great favorite, "Murphy, the Indian Killer." I must have read this book several times. Novels, or nature books, or natural-history books, were unknown in that library.
It is said, in short, that a natural-history class is not capable of being defined that the class Rosaceæ, for instance, or the class of Fishes, is not accurately and absolutely definable, inasmuch as its members will present exceptions to every possible definition; and that the members of the class are united together only by the circumstance that they are all more like some imaginary average rose or average fish, than they resemble anything else.
Indeed, the foundation of my knowledge of the ways of the wild creatures was laid when I was a farm boy, quite unconscious of the natural-history value of my observations. What, or who, as I grew up, gave my mind its final push in this direction would not be easy to name.
There is yet another way in which natural history may, I am convinced, take a profound hold upon practical life, and that is, by its influence over our finer feelings, as the greatest of all sources of that pleasure which is derivable from beauty. I do not pretend that natural-history knowledge, as such, can increase our sense of the beautiful in natural objects.
Just how long it would take Wallace to make his Malaysian natural-history survey he did not know, but in a letter to Darwin he stated that he expected to be absent from England at least two years. He was gone eight years, and during this time, walked, paddled or rode horseback fifteen thousand miles, and visited many islands never before trod by the foot of a white man.
He accompanied Humboldt to America, and subsequently became a joint author with the great traveler and scientist of several valuable works on the botany, natural-history, etc., of the New World. He was detained as a prisoner for nearly ten years by Dictator Francia of Paraguay to prevent him from, or to punish him for, attempting to cultivate the maté, or Paraguay tea, in that country.
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