179. I have no time to-day to push my argument farther; but I have said enough, I think, to induce you to bear with me in the statement of my main theorem--that reading and writing are in no sense education, unless they contribute to this end of making us feel kindly towards all creatures; but that drawing, and especially physiologic drawing, is vital education of a most precious kind. Farther, that more good would be done by any English nobleman who would keep his estate lovely in its native wildness; and let every animal live upon it in peace that chose to come there, than will be done, as matters are going now, by the talk of all the Lords in Parliament as long as we live to listen to them; and I will even venture to tell you my hope, though I shall be dead long before its possible fulfilment, that one day the English people will, indeed, so far recognize what education means as to surround this university with the loveliest park in England, twenty miles square; that they will forbid, in that environment, every unclean, mechanical, and vulgar trade and manufacture, as any man would forbid them in his own garden;--that they will abolish every base and ugly building, and nest of vice and misery, as they would cast out a devil;--that the streams of the Isis and Cherwell will be kept pure and quiet among their fields and trees; and that, within this park, every English wild flower that can bloom in lowland will be suffered to grow in luxuriance, and every living creature that haunts wood and stream know that it has happy refuge. And now to our immediate work. 180. The natural history of anything, or of any creature, divides itself properly into three branches. We have first to collect and examine the traditions respecting the thing, so that we may know what the effect of its existence has hitherto been on the minds of men, and may have at our command what data exist to help us in our inquiries about it, or to guide us in our own thoughts of it. We have secondly to examine and describe the thing, or creature, in its actual state, with utmost attainable veracity of observation. Lastly, we have to examine under what laws of chemistry and physics the matter of which the thing is made has been collected and constructed. Thus we have first to know the poetry of it--_i.e._, what it has been to man, or what man has made of it. Secondly, the actual facts of its existence. Thirdly, the physical causes of these facts, if we can discover them.