“When I had learned what little they teach in schools, especially drawing, and that is useful in scientific pursuits, I was allowed to choose my own books, and attend lectures. One blessed day I sat and listened to Agassiz--ah! No tragedy well played, nor opera sung, ever moved a heart so deeply as he moved mine, that great and earnest man, whose enthusiasm for nature was as fresh as my own, and his knowledge a thousand times larger. Talk of heaven opening to the Christian pilgrim as he passes Jordan! Why, God made earth as well as heaven, and it is worthy of the Architect; and it is a joy divine when earth opens to the true admirer of God's works. Sir, earth opened to me, as Agassiz discoursed. “I followed him about like a little bloodhound, and dived into the libraries after each subject he treated or touched. “It was another little epoch in my life when I read 'White's Letters to Pennant' about natural history in Selborne. Selborne is an English village, not half so pretty as most; and, until Gilbert White came, nobody saw anything there worth printing. His book showed me that the humblest spot in nature becomes extraordinary the moment extraordinary observation is applied to it. I must mimic Gilbert White directly. I pestered my poor parents to spend a month or two in the depths of the country, on the verge of a forest. They yielded, with groans; I kissed them, and we rusticated. I pried into every living thing, not forgetting my old friends, the insect tribe. Here I found ants with grander ideas than they have to home, and satisfied myself they have more brains than apes. They co-operate more, and in complicated things. Sir, there are ants that make greater marches, for their size, than Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Even the less nomad tribes will march through fields of grass, where each blade is a high gum-tree to them, and never lose the track. I saw an army of red ants, with generals, captains, and ensigns, start at daybreak, march across a road, through a hedge, and then through high grass till noon, and surprise a fortification of black ants, and take it after a sanguinary resistance. All that must have been planned beforehand, you know, and carried out to the letter. Once I found a colony busy on some hard ground, preparing an abode. I happened to have been microscoping a wasp, so I threw him down among the ants. They were disgusted. They ran about collecting opinions. Presently half of them burrowed into the earth below and undermined him, till he lay on a crust of earth as thin as a wafer, and a deep grave below. Then they all got on him except one, and He stood pompous on a pebble, and gave orders. The earth broke--the wasp went down into his grave--and the ants soon covered him with loose earth, and resumed their domestic architecture. I concluded that though the monkey resembles man most in body, the ant comes nearer him in mind. As for dogs, I don't know where to rank them in