It is Charles Kingsley, I think, who defines “a thoroughly good naturalist” as one “who knows his own parish thoroughly,” a definition, all questions of style aside, that accurately describes the nature-writer. He has field enough for his pen in a parish; he can hardly know more and know it intimately enough to write about it. For the nature-writer, while he may be more or less of a scientist, is never mere scientist--zoölogist or botanist. Animals are not his theme; flowers are not his theme. Nothing less than the universe is his theme, as it pivots on him, around the distant boundaries of his immediate neighborhood. His is an emotional, not an intellectual, point of view; a literary, not a scientific, approach; which means that he is the axis of his world, its great circumference, rather than any fact--any flower, or star, or tortoise. Now to the scientist the tortoise is the thing: the particular species _Thalassochelys kempi_; of the family Testudinidæ; of the order Chelonia; of the class Reptilia; of the branch Vertebrata. But the nature-writer never pauses over this matter to capitalize it. His tortoise may or may not come tagged with this string of distinguishing titles. A tortoise is a tortoise for a’ that, particularly if it should happen to be an old Sussex tortoise which has been kept for thirty years in a yard by the nature-writer’s friend, and which “On the 1st November began to dig the ground in order to the forming of its hybernaculum, which it had fixed on just beside a great tuft of hepaticas. “P. S.--In about three days after I left Sussex, the tortoise retired into the ground under the hepatica.” This is a bit of nature-writing by Gilbert White, of Selborne, which sounds quite a little like science, but which you noticed was really spoiled as science by its “tuft of hepaticas.” There is no buttonhole in science for the nosegay. And when, since the Vertebrates began, did a scientific tortoise ever _retire_? One more quotation, I think, will make clear my point, namely, that the nature-writer is not detached from himself and alone with his fact, like the scientist, but is forever relating his tortoise to himself. The lines just quoted were from a letter dated April 12, 1772. Eight years afterwards, in another letter, dated Selborne, April 21, 1780, and addressed to “the Hon. Daines Barrington,” the good rector writes:-- “DEAR SIR,--The old Sussex tortoise, that I have mentioned to you so often, is become my property. I dug it out of its winter dormitory in March last, when it was enough awakened to express its resentments by hissing, and, packing it in a box with earth, carried it eighty miles in post-chaises. The rattle and hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it that, when I turned it out on the border, it walked twice down to the bottom of my garden.”