to marine naturalists;
and, some time ago, there appeared in the newspapers a letter from
Carlyle, regretting that he himself had not been indoctrinated into the
zoology of our waysides. I have heard a man out of health, hypochondriac,
and idle, recommended to begin botany, geology, or chemistry, as a
diversion of his misery. The idea is plausible and superficial. An
overpowering taste for any subject--botany, zoology, antiquities,
music--is properly affirmed to be born with a man. The forces of the
brain must from the first incline largely to that one species of
impressions, to which must be added years of engrossing pursuit. We may
gaze with envy at the fervour of a botanist over his dried plants, and
may wish to take up so fascinating a pursuit: we may just as easily wish
to be Archimedes when he leaped out of the bath; a man cannot re-cast
his brain nor re-live his life. A taste of a high order, founded on
natural endowment, formed by education, and strengthened by active
devotion, is also paid for by the atrophy of other tastes, pursuits, and
powers. Carlyle might have contracted an interest in frogs, and spiders,
and bees, and the other denizens of the wayside, but it would have been
with the surrender of some other interest, the diversion of his genius
out of its present channels. The strong emotions of the mind are not to
be turned off and on, to this subject and to that. If you begin early
with a human being, you may impress a particular direction upon the
feelings, you may even cross a natural tendency, and work up a taste on
a small basis of predisposition. Place any youth in the midst of
artists, and you may induce a taste for art that shall at length be
decided and strong. But if you were to take the same person in middle
life and immure him in a laboratory, that he might become an
enthusiastic chemist, the limits of human nature would probably forbid
your success.

Such very strong tastes as impart a high and perennial zest to one's
life are merely the special direction of a natural exuberance of feeling
or emotion. A spare and thin emotional temperament will undoubtedly have
preferences, likings and dislikings, but it can never supply the
material for fervour or enthusiasm in anything.

The early determining of natural tastes is a subject of high practical
interest. We shall only remark at present that a varied and broad
groundwork of early education is the best known device for this end.

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