This I shall say, but little more than this, on the religious effect of the study of natural history.  I do not wish to preach a sermon to you.  I can trust God’s world to bear better witness than I can, of the Loving Father who made it.  I thank him from my own experience for the testimony of His Creation, only next to the testimony of His Bible.  I have watched scientific discoveries which were supposed in my boyhood to be contrary to revelation, found out one by one to confirm and explain revelation, as crude and hasty theories were corrected by more abundant facts, and men saw more clearly what both the Bible and Nature really did say; and I can trust that the same process will go on for ever, and that God’s earth and God’s word will never contradict each other.  I have found the average of scientific men, not less, but more, godly and righteous men than the average of their neighbours; and I can trust that this will be more and more the case as science deepens and widens.  And therefore I can trust that every patient, truthful, and healthful mind will, the more it contemplates the works of God, re-echo St. Paul’s great declaration that the Invisible things of God are clearly seen from the foundation of the world, being understood by the things which are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.  And so trusting, I pass on to a lower view of the subject, and yet not an unnecessary one.

In an industrial country like this, the practical utility of any study must needs be always thrown into the scale; and natural history seems at first sight somewhat unpractical.  What money will it earn for a man in after life?—­is a question which will be asked; and which it is folly to despise.  For if the only answer be:  “None at all,” a man has a right to rejoin:  “Then let me take up some pursuit which will train and refresh my mind as much as this one, and yet be of pecuniary benefit to me some day.”  If you can find such a study, by all means follow it:  but I say that this study too may be of great practical benefit in after life.  How much money have I, young as I am, seen wasted for want of a little knowledge of botany, geology, or chemistry.  How many a clever man becomes the dupe of empirics for want of a little science.  How many a mine is sought for where no mine could be; or crop attempted to be grown, where no such crop could grow.  How many a hidden treasure, on the other hand, do men walk over unheeding.  How many a new material, how many an improved process in manufacture is possible, yet is passed over, for want of a little science.  And for the man who emigrates, and comes in contact with rude nature teeming with unsuspected wealth, of what incalculable advantage to have if it be but the rudiments of those sciences, which will tell him the properties, and therefore the value, of the plants, the animals, the minerals, the climates with which he meets?  True—­home-learnt natural history will not altogether teach him about these things, because most of them must needs be new:  but it will teach him to compare and classify them as he finds them, and so by analogy with things already known to him, to discover their intrinsic worth.