necessary duty it is, and one to be
performed with the most conscientious patience and accuracy, so that a
sound foundation may be built for future speculations. But young
naturalists should act not merely as Nature's registrars and
census-takers, but as her policemen and gamekeepers; and ask everything
they meet--How did you get here? By what road did you come? What was
your last place of abode? And now you are here, how do you get your
living? Are you and your children thriving, like decent people who can
take care of themselves, or growing pauperised and degraded, and dying
out? Not that we have a fear of your becoming a dangerous class. Madam
Nature allows no dangerous classes, in the modern sense. She has,
doubtless for some wise reason, no mercy for the weak. She rewards each
organism according to its works; and if anything grows too weak or stupid
to take care of itself, she gives it its due deserts by letting it die
and disappear. So, you plant or you animal, are you among the strong,
the successful, the multiplying, the colonising? Or are you among the
weak, the failing, the dwindling, the doomed?

These questions may seem somewhat rude: but you may comfort yourself by
the thought that plants and animals, though they deserve all kindness,
all admiration, deserve no courtesy--at least in this respect. For they
are, one and all, wherever you find them, vagrants and landloupers,
intruders and conquerors, who have got where they happen to be simply by
the law of the strongest--generally not without a little robbery and
murder. They have no right save that of possession; the same by which
the puffin turns out the old rabbits, eats the young ones, and then lays
her eggs in the rabbit burrow--simply because she can.

Now, you will see at once that such a course of questioning will call out
a great many curious and interesting answers, if you can only get the
things to tell you their story; as you always may, if you will
cross-examine them long enough; and will lead you into many subjects
beside mere botany or entomology. So various, indeed, are the subjects
which you will thus start, that I can only hint at them now in the most
cursory fashion.

At the outset you will soon find yourself involved in chemical and
meteorological questions: as, for instance, when you ask--How is it that
I find one flora on the sea-shore, another on the sandstone, another on
the chalk, and another on the peat-making gravell