Thirdly, in connection with our simplicity and good-humour, and partly
with that very love of the grotesque which debases our ideal, we have a
sympathy with the lower animals which is peculiarly our own; and which,
though it has already found some exquisite expression in the works of
Bewick and Landseer, is yet quite undeveloped. This sympathy, with the
aid of our now authoritative science of physiology, and in association
with our British love of adventure, will, I hope, enable us to give to
the future inhabitants of the globe an almost perfect record of the
present forms of animal life upon it, of which many are on the point of
being extinguished....
While I myself hold this professorship, I shall direct you in these
exercises very definitely to natural history, and to landscape; not
only because in these two branches I am probably able to show you
truths which might be despised by my successors; but because I think
the vital and joyful study of natural history quite the principal
element requiring introduction, not only into University, but into
national, education, from highest to lowest; and I even will risk
incurring your ridicule by confessing one of my fondest dreams, that I
may succeed in making some of you English youths like better to look at
a bird than to shoot it; and even desire to make wild creatures tame,
instead of tame creatures wild.
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