Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the ShoreKingsley, Charles
History
Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore
Kingsley, Charles
Natural history -- Juvenile literature; Seashore biology -- Juvenile literature
should know how to swim for his life, to pull an oar, sail a boat, and
ride the first horse which comes to hand; and, finally, he should be a
thoroughly good shot, and a skilful fisherman; and, if he go far abroad,
be able on occasion to fight for his life.
For his moral character, he must, like a knight of old, be first of all
gentle and courteous, ready and able to ingratiate himself with the poor,
the ignorant, and the savage; not only because foreign travel will be
often otherwise impossible, but because he knows how much invaluable
local information can be only obtained from fishermen, miners, hunters,
and tillers of the soil. Next, he should be brave and enterprising, and
withal patient and undaunted; not merely in travel, but in investigation;
knowing (as Lord Bacon might have put it) that the kingdom of Nature,
like the kingdom of heaven, must be taken by violence, and that only to
those who knock long and earnestly does the great mother open the doors
of her sanctuary. He must be of a reverent turn of mind also; not rashly
discrediting any reports, however vague and fragmentary; giving man
credit always for some germ of truth, and giving Nature credit for an
inexhaustible fertility and variety, which will keep him his life long
always reverent, yet never superstitious; wondering at the commonest, but
not surprised by the most strange; free from the idols of size and
sensuous loveliness; able to see grandeur in the minutest objects,
beauty, in the most ungainly; estimating each thing not carnally, as the
vulgar do, by its size or its pleasantness to the senses, but
spiritually, by the amount of Divine thought revealed to Man therein;
holding every phenomenon worth the noting down; believing that every
pebble holds a treasure, every bud a revelation; making it a point of
conscience to pass over nothing through laziness or hastiness, lest the
vision once offered and despised should be withdrawn; and looking at
every object as if he were never to behold it again.
Moreover, he must keep himself free from all those perturbations of mind
which not only weaken energy, but darken and confuse the inductive
faculty; from haste and laziness, from melancholy, testiness, pride, and
all the passions which make men see only what they wish to see. Of
solemn and scrupulous reverence for truth; of the habit of mind which
regards each fact and discovery, not as our own possession, but as the
possession of its Creator, independent of us, our tastes, our needs, or
our vain-glory, I hardly need to speak; for it is the very essence of a
nature’s faculty—the very tenure of his existence: and without
truthfulness science would be as impossible now as chivalry would have
been of old.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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