If any one shall say—­By that definition you make not only geology and chemistry branches of natural history, but meteorology and astronomy likewise—­I cannot deny it.  They deal each of them, with realms of Nature.  Geology is, literally, the natural history of soils and lands; chemistry the natural history of compounds, organic and inorganic; meteorology the natural history of climates; astronomy the natural history of planetary and solar bodies.  And more, you cannot now study deeply any branch of what is popularly called Natural History—­that is, plants and animals—­without finding it necessary to learn something, and more and more as you go deeper, of those very sciences.  As the marvellous interdependence of all natural objects and forces unfolds itself more and more, so the once separate sciences, which treated of different classes of natural objects, are forced to interpenetrate, as it were; and to supplement themselves by knowledge borrowed from each other.  Thus—­to give a single instance—­no man can now be a first-rate botanist unless he be also no mean meteorologist, no mean geologist, and—­as Mr. Darwin has shown in his extraordinary discoveries about the fertilisation of plants by insects—­no mean entomologist likewise.

It is difficult, therefore, and indeed somewhat unwise and unfair, to put any limit to the term Natural History, save that it shall deal only with nature and with matter; and shall not pretend—­as some would have it to do just now—­to go out of its own sphere to meddle with moral and spiritual matters.  But, for practical purposes, we may define the natural history of the causes which have made it what it is, and filled it with the natural objects which it holds.  And if any one would know how to study the natural history of any given spot as the history of the causes which have made it what it is, and filled it with the natural objects which it holds.  And if any one would know how to study the natural history of a place, and how to write it, let him read—­and if he has read its delightful pages in youth, read once again—­that hitherto unrivalled little monograph, White’s “Natural History of Selborne;” and let him then try, by the light of improved science, to do for any district where he may be stationed, what White did for Selborne nearly one hundred years ago.  Let him study its plants, its animals, its soils and rocks; and last, but not least, its scenery, as the total outcome of what the soils, and plants, and animals, have made it.  I say, have made it.  How far the nature of the soils, and the rocks will affect the scenery of a district may be well learnt from a very clever and interesting little book of Professor Geikie’s, on “The Scenery of Scotland as affected by its Geological Structure.”  How far the plants, and trees affect not merely the general beauty, the richness or barrenness of a country, but also its very shape; the rate at which the hills are destroyed and washed into the lowland; the rate at which the seaboard is being removed by the action of waves—­all these are branches of study which is becoming more and more important.