For they are, one and all, wherever you find them, vagrants and landlopers, intruders and conquerors, who have got where they happen to be simply by the law of the strongest-generally not without a little robbery and murder. These questions may seem somewhat rude: but you may comfort yourself by the thought that plants and animals, though they deserve all kindness, all admiration, deserve no courtesy-at least in this respect. So, you plant or you animal, are you among the strong, the successful, the multiplying, the colonising? Or are you among the weak, the failing, the dwindling, the doomed? She rewards each organism according to its works and if anything grows too weak or stupid to take care of itself, she gives it its due deserts by letting it die and disappear. She has, doubtless for some wise reason, no mercy for the weak. Madame Nature allows no dangerous classes, in the modern sense. But young naturalists should act not merely as Nature’s registrars and census-takers, but as her policemen and gamekeepers and ask everything they meet-How did you get there? By what road did you come? What was your last place of abode? And now you are here, how do you get your living? Are you and your children thriving, like decent people who can take care of themselves, or growing pauperised and degraded, and dying out? Not that we have a fear of your becoming a dangerous class.
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But I may, perhaps, give a few hints which will be of use to the younger members of this Society, and will point out to them how to get a new relish for the pursuit of field science.īio-geology, then, begins with asking every plant or animal you meet, large or small, not merely-What is your name? That is the collector and classifier’s duty and a most necessary duty it is, and one to be performed with the most conscientious patience and accuracy, so that a sound foundation may be built for future speculations. I doubt not that there are many here who know far more about the subject than I who are far better read than I am in the works of Forbes, Darwin, Wallace, Hooker, Moritz Wagner, and the other illustrious men who have written on it. I mean the infant science of Bio-geology-the science which treats of the distribution of plants and animals over the globe, and the cause of that distribution. As an old sanitary reformer, practical, as well as theoretical, I am but too well aware of the difficulties which beset any complete scheme of drainage, especially in an ancient city like this where men are paying the penalty of their predecessors’ ignorance and dwelling, whether they choose or not, over fifteen centuries of accumulated dirt.Īnd, therefore, taking for granted that there is energy and intellect enough in Winchester to conquer these difficulties in due time, I go on to ask you to consider, for a time, a subject which is growing more and more important and interesting, a subject the study of which will do much towards raising the field naturalist from a mere collector of specimens-as he was twenty years ago-to a philosopher elucidating some of the grandest problems. It seemed to me almost an impertinence to say more in a city of whose local circumstances I know little or nothing. Of all this I longed to speak but I thought it best only to hint at it, and leave the question to your common sense and your humanity taking for granted that your minds, like the minds of all right-minded Englishmen, have been of late painfully awakened to its importance. I am not sure that I ought not to have postponed a question of mere natural history, to speak to you as scientific men, on the questions of life and death, which have been forced upon us by the awful warning of an illustrious personage’s illness of preventible disease, its frightful prevalency of the 200,000 persons who are said to have died of fever alone since the Prince Consort’s death, ten years ago of the remedies of drainage of sewage disinfection and utilisation and of the assistance which you, as a body of scientific men, can give to any effort towards saving the lives and health of our fellow-citizens from those unseen poisons which lurk like wild beasts couched in the jungle, ready to spring at any moment on the unsuspecting, the innocent, the helpless. I am not sure that the subject of my address is rightly chosen.
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