boredom never.  The infinity of things forbids it.  I once heard of a tipsy young artist who, on his way home on a beautiful night, had his attention called by a maudlin friend to the stars, where they twinkled like a million larks.  He raised his eyes to the heavens, then shook his head.  “There are too many of them,” he complained wearily.  It should be remembered, however, that he was drunk, and that he did not know astronomy.  There could be too many stars only if they were all turned out on the same pattern, and made the same pattern on the sky.  Fortunately, the universe is the creation not of a manufacturer but of an artist.

There is scarcely a subject that does not contain sufficient Asias of differences to keep an explorer happy for a lifetime.  It would be easy to do nothing but chase butterflies all one’s days.  It is said that thirteen thousand species of butterflies have been already discovered, and it is suggested that there may be nearly twice as many that have so far escaped the naturalists.  After so monstrous a figure, we are not surprised to learn that there are sixty-eight species of butterflies in Great Britain and Ireland.  We should be astonished, however, had we not already expended our astonishment on the larger number.  How many of us are there who could name even half-a-dozen varieties?  We all know the tortoiseshell and the white and the blue—­the little blue butterflies that flutter over the gold and red of the cornfields.  But the average man does not even know by name such varieties as the Camberwell Beauty, the Dingy Skipper, the Pearl-bordered Fritillary, and the White-letter Hairstreak.  As for the moth, are there not as many sorts of moths as there are words in a dictionary?  Many men give all the pleasant hours of their lives to learning how to know the difference between one of them and another.  One used to see these moth-hunters on windless nights in a Hampstead lane pursuing their quarry fantastically with nets in the light of the lamps.  In pursuing moths, they pursue knowledge.  This, they feel, is life at its most exciting, its most intense.  They regard a man who does not know and is not interested in the difference between one moth and another as a man not yet thoroughly awakened from his pre-natal sleep.  And, indeed, one could not conceive a more appalling sort of blank idiocy than the condition of a man who could not tell one thing from another in any department of life whatever.  We would rather change lives with a jelly-fish than with such a man.  This luxury of variety was not meant to be ignored.  We throw ourselves into it with exhilaration as a swimmer plunges into the sea.  There are few forms of happiness I know which are more enviable than that of those who have eyes for birds and flowers.  How they rejoice on learning that, according to one theory, there are a hundred and three different species of brambles to be found in these islands!  They would not have them fewer by a single one.  It is extraordinarily