The signification attached to the word ‘Nature’ is by no means the same at the present day as it has been in the past: as commonly used it is a word of varied meanings and limitations, so that misconception and confusion is liable to be associated with it. By the professed student of modern sciences it is usually understood as a name for the entire mechanism of the universe, the kosmos in all its parts; and it is in this sense that I use it. But many still identify ‘Nature’ with a limited portion of that great system, and even retain for it a special application to the animals and plants of this earth and their immediate surroundings. Thus we have the term ‘natural history’ and the French term ‘les sciences naturelles’ limited to the study of the more immediate and concrete forms of animals, plants, and crystals. There is some justification for separating the conception of Nature as specially concerned in the production and maintenance of living things from that larger Nature which embraces, together with this small but deeply significant area, the whole expanse of the heavens in the one direction and Man himself in the other. Giordano Bruno, who a little more than 300 years ago visited Oxford and expounded his views, was perhaps the first to perceive and teach the unity of this greater Nature, anticipating thus in his prophetic vision the conclusion which we now accept as the result of an accumulated mass of evidence. Shakespeare came into touch with Bruno’s conception, and has contrasted the more limited and a larger (though not the largest) view of Nature in the words of Perdita and Polyxenes. Says Perdita:-- ‘ ... the fairest flowers o’ the season Are our carnations, and streak’d gillyvors, Which some call Nature’s bastards; of that kind Our rustic garden’s barren; and I care not To get slips of them.... For I have heard it said, There is an art which, in their piedness, shares With great creating nature.’ To which Polyxenes replies:-- ‘Say there be-- Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean: so, over that art, Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentle scion to the wildest stock; And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race; this is an art Which does mend nature,--change it, rather: but The art itself is nature.’