ream running by the hedge, have been
transformed into straight roads between land-allotments, with
scattered houses built by artizans. And where I picked blackberries,
factories now stand.

[Footnote 50: From Part I, Chapter II, of the "Autobiography."
Spencer's boyhood was passed in Derby. Copyright, 1904, by D. Appleton
& Co., by whose kind permission passages from this work are printed
here.]

There was a garden of some size behind the house containing fruit
trees, and permitting a certain amount of floriculture; and my father
rented an additional piece of land close by as a vegetable-garden. Not
infrequently I had to join in gardening--more frequently, indeed, than
I liked. Often when I ought to have been busy at some task which my
father had set to me, I was otherwise occupied--throwing stones at the
birds that settled on the walls and hedges; observing the bees on the
kidney-bean flowers, piercing the base of each corolla to reach the
honey; or, at a disused pump-trough containing stagnant water,
watching the larvae of the gnats as they came wriggling to the surface,
putting out their tails to breathe, and then descending. Most children
are instinctively naturalists, and were they encouraged would readily
pass from careless observations to careful and deliberate ones. My
father was wise in such matters; and I was not simply allowed but
encouraged to enter on natural history.

The majority of my activities, however, were those of the ordinary
schoolboy, who, on Saturday afternoons and the like occasions of
leisure, is commonly given to country rambles and the search for
hedge-side treasures. During my early years the neighboring regions of
Osmaston and Normanton were explored by me in all their details: every
hedge becoming known in the course of expeditions, now in the spring
seeking birds' nests, now gathering violets or dog-roses, and later in
the year collecting sometimes mushrooms, sometimes blackberries,
sometimes hips and haws, crab-apples and other wild products. Beyond
the pleasurable exercise and the gratification to my love of
adventure, there was gained during these excursions much miscellaneous
knowledge of things, and the perceptions were beneficially
disciplined. Of all the occupations, however, to which holidays were
devoted, I delighted most in fishing. There was the river Derwent, at
that time not the black dirty stream it is now, but tolerably clear
and containing a fair supply of various fis