To turn the imagination not inwards, but outwards; to give it a class of objects which may excite wonder, reverence, the love of novelty and of discovering, without heating the brain or exciting the passions—­this is one of the great problems of education; and I believe from experience that the study of natural history supplies in great part what we want.  The earnest naturalist is pretty sure to have obtained that great need of all men, to get rid of self.  He who, after the hours of business, finds himself with a mind relaxed and wearied, will not be tempted to sit at home dreaming over impossible scenes of pleasure, or to go for amusement to haunts of coarse excitement, if he have in every hedge-bank, and wood land, and running stream, in every bird among the boughs, and every cloud above his head, stores of interest which will enable him to forget awhile himself, and man, and all the cares, even all the hopes of life, and to be alone with the inexhaustible beauty and glory of Nature, and of God who made her.  An hour or two every day spent after business-hours in botany, geology, entomology, at the telescope or the microscope, is so much refreshment gained for the mind for to-morrow’s labour, so much rest for irritated or anxious feelings, often so much saved from frivolity or sin.  And how easy this pursuit.  How abundant the subjects of it!  Look round you here.  Within the reach of every one of you are wonders beyond all poets’ dreams.  Not a hedge-bank but has its hundred species of plants, each different and each beautiful; and when you tire of them—­if you ever can tire—­a trip into the meadows by the Thames, with the rich vegetation of their dikes, floating flower-beds of every hue, will bring you as it were into a new world, new forms, new colours, new delight.  You ask why this is?  And you find yourself at once involved in questions of soil and climate, which lead you onward, step by step, into the deepest problems of geology and chemistry.  In entomology, too, if you have any taste for the beauties of form and colour, any fondness for mechanical and dynamical science, the insects, even to the smallest, will supply endless food for such likings; while their instincts and their transformations, as well as the equally wondrous chemical transformation of salts and gases into living plants, which agricultural chemistry teaches you, will tempt you to echo every day Mephistopheles’s magic song, when he draws wine out of the table in Auersbach’s cellar: 

Wine is grapes, and grapes are wood—­
The wooden board yields wine as good: 
It is but a deeper glance
Into Nature’s countenance. 
All is plain to him who seeth;
Lift the veil and look beneath,
And behold, the wise man saith,
Miracles, if you have faith.