ise might have been a member of the Royal Society,
if he could have condescended to so ignoble an ambition. It had but
just been discovered that a surface inclined at a certain angle with
the plane of the horizon took more of the sun's rays. The tortoise had
always known this (though he unostentatiously made no parade of it),
and used accordingly to tilt himself up against the garden-wall in the
autumn. He seems to have been more of a philosopher than even Mr. White
himself, caring for nothing but to get under a cabbage-leaf when
it rained, or the sun was too hot, and to bury himself alive before
frost,--a four-footed Diogenes, who carried his tub on his back.

There are moods in which this kind of history is infinitely
refreshing. These creatures whom we affect to look down upon as the
drudges of instinct are members of a commonwealth whose constitution
rests on immovable bases, never any need of reconstruction there! _They_
never dream of settling it by vote that eight hours are equal to ten, or
that one creature is as clever as another and no more. _They_ do not
use their poor wits in regulating God's clocks, nor think they cannot
go astray so long as they carry their guide-board about with them,--a
delusion we often practise upon ourselves with our high and mighty
reason, that admirable finger-post which points every way and always
right. It is good for us now and then to converse with a world like Mr.
White's, where Man is the least important of animals. But one who, like
me, has always lived in the country and always on the same spot, is
drawn to his book by other occult sympathies. Do we not share his
indignation at that stupid Martin who had graduated his thermometer no
lower than 4o above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in the coldest weather
ever known the mercury basely absconded into the bulb, and left us to
see the victory slip through our fingers, just as they were closing
upon it? No man, I suspect, ever lived long in the country without being
bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to be hotter and
colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and
larger blow down than his neighbors. With us descendants of the Puritans
especially, these weather-competitions supply the abnegated excitement
of the race-course. Men learn to value thermometers of the true
imaginative temperament, capable of prodigious elations and
corresponding dejections. The other day (5th July) I marked 98o in the