BOOKS.

LIFE OF THE REV. J. G. WOOD.*

THE g • flint naturalist and popular writer whose life and work

are described in the volume which is the sitbject of this review, was happy in the time at which his work first appeared. • The interest in the habits and personalities of animals, as well as in their structure, now shared by so many, had then hardly found expression. But it was in the air. As early as 1803, Bewick had deserted London, and returned to his native county to spend his days in portraying the birds and beasts he loved. Bewick's book was too expensive to be popular. But the admirable History of Birds, by Bishop Stanley—father of the late Dean of Westminster—had a wide circulation. Boys like Martin in Tom Brown's Schooldays were a new and increasing type, destined to become the Bucklands and Woods of the future; and though Tom Hughes complained that Young England did not know "their own lanes, and woods, and fields," the public took kindly to the new ideas with which Charles Kingsley familiarised them in the pursuits of Tom Thurnall and Major Campbell, in Two Years Ago.

But the days of the "field naturalist" were not fully come, and scientific men looked upon natural history as the property of the laboratory and dissecting-room alone. It was Wood's boast that he broke down this monopoly, and made over a share to the public. Too much technicality had, he thought, stood between the public and the subject he loved beat; and he set himself to be the "minister and interpreter" not only of Nature, but of the naturalists. A second objection to the naturalists of the day was that devotion to classification had led to a neglect of the study of habit, and a contempt for animals as living beings. "When they see a creature new to them," wrote Wood, "they are seized with a burning desire to cut it up, to analyse it, to get it under the microscope, to publish a learned book about it, and to put up' its remains in cells and bottles. They delight in an abnormal hwmopophysis [P] ; they pin their faith on a pterygoid process; and they quarrel with each other about a notch on basisphenoid bone." As a remedy to this, Wood praised the work of the "field naturalists," who delight "in penetrating to the homes and haunts of the creatures they love, and spend whole days and nights in watching their habits." And to help such naturalists his early work was written. Wood never neglected anatomy and classification himself, but he rightly held that if natural history was to be made popular, observation, or the record of facts already observed, must come first, and classification and inference later. This order he maintained even in his chief work, the large Natural History, giving the life-history of the creatures first, and appending the classifications to each volume. Naturally, in most of his work the anecdotal and personal element predominates ; and the public gladly welcomed a writer who brought them into the company of birds and beasts with individual characters and non-Latinised names.

His taste for observation was largely due to early training. His father, a surgeon, settled in Oxford when the boy was three years old. The Oxford district is a naturalist's paradise. The Isis is the home of rare water birds, and rarer plants and insects. Bagley Wood is a noted haunt of scarce butterflies, and each college garden is an aviary. As a child, and later as an undergraduate, Wood used these advantages to the full. The curator of the Ashmolean Museum noted his enthusiasm and aided him. At eleven, he was sent to a bitter old grammar. schoolin Derbyshire ; but he found plenty of time to observe the wild life of the country, and each holiday his first visit was to the museum, to examine the additions made in his absence. At seventeen, he matriculated at Merton, and though he had to maintain himself by taking pupils, natural history was not neglected, but pursued with more purpose and system than before. His rooms were full of "fowls and creeping things," and he had at one time six hundred "woolly bear" caterpillars, • The Bro. J, G. Wood: his Life and Work. By Theodore Wood. London: Cassell and Co.

living on dumb-nettles in an ingeniously made cage, with a water-tank to keep the nettle-stems fresh. By preserving and dissecting these creatures at all stages of growth, he gained a complete knowledge of the development of moths. This was serious work, and was supplemented by a two years' course of comparative anatomy in the anatomical museum at Christ Church, under Dr. Acland. He thus added to his early habits of observation a thorough knowledge of anatomy. Always laborious, he was a far more " thorough " naturalist than the popular character of his books might suggest ; and a taste for omnivorous reading and fondness for the classics gave his style an ease and facility which a. purely scientific training sometimes fails to confer.

His first book, a small Natural History, was published when he was working with Dr. Acland. Modest in conception, it only aimed at conveying the main facts of animal life in a "tongue understanded of the people." Anecdotes of Animal Life, published in 1853, was pleasantly written amid the duties

of an Oxford parish; and in 1856, when he had been appointed Chaplain of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, he wrote Our Feathered Friends. This was the result of much close observation, and he was able to report a clear balance of good done by birds to agriculture. Common Objects of the Sea. Shorewas his next work. The public were delighted ; and the

hobby of collecting and petting sea creatures supplied John Leech with jokes for weeks.

But Wood had a very unpleasant experience with one of the less common objects of the shore, while swimming at some distance from the beach. He found himself encircled by the filmy threads of one of the stinging jelly-fish :--

" I raised my right arm out of the water," he writes, "and found that dozens of slender and transparent threads were hanging from it, and evidently still attached to the medusa, now some forty or fifty feet away. The filaments were slight and delicate as those of a spider's web Before I reached shore the pain became fearfully severe, and on quitting the cool waves it was absolute torture. Wherever one of the multitudinous threads had come in contact with the skin there appeared a light scarlet line, which on closer examination was resolvable into minute dots or pustules; and the sensation was much as if each dot were

charged with a red-hot needle When I happened to catch a glimpse of my own face in the mirror, I hardly knew it,—all white and shrivelled, with cold perspiration standing in large drops on the surface !"

Common Objects of the Country was even more successful. It was a real " field naturalist's" book, and though lightly written, and not comparable to the work of St. John or Newman's Letters of .Rusticus, it met and fostered the growing taste for such knowledge as it gave. Its merit lies in its popularity ; and if Wood had not written, Richard Jefferies might not have found so many readers.

His large Natural History is no doubt his best work. The most typical and interesting animals are selected for descrip- tion, and the illustrations are excellent. The same may also be said for Homes Without Hands and Insects Abroad. In the last book especially, the artists joined the author in examining three thousand drawers at the British Museum, and six hundred insects were illustrated in the plates. His genial, vigorous character, which made him friends of all animals, from caged lions to surly terriers, conciliated his own species as readily, and artists, publishers, and curators aided him spontaneously.

In 1862 he had given up the chaplaincy at St. Bartholomew's, owing to ill-health; but he abandoned the cure of souls only to take the whole animal world under his protection. Not that Wood was willing to allow sharp distinctions to be drawn between man and "the bettsts that perish." He was a firm believer in the immortality of animals, and Man and Beast, Here and Hereafter, was the result of the thought and notes of fifteen years. It had been preceded by Bible Animals, a careful account of the creatures mentioned in the Bible, with explanations of the context. If any reader will compare this book with the medialval Bestiaries on the same subject, with their silly tales of the " caladrus," pelican, panther, and whale, he will acknowledge that ii natural history at least, we have made some advance towards truth. Wood never claimed any egiality between men and animals hereafter, but never gave up his belief in their future existence.

He had known Waterton, and in 1878 he edited his Wanderings, with an explanatory index of the native terms used, and then threw himself into an investigation of the rational treatment of horses. Shoes and bearing-reins were alike condemned, as well as "blinkers." Of his posthumous works, The Dominion of Man is perhaps the best known, a comprehensive historic survey of the relation of man to animals.

But the last years of his busy life were much engrossed by lecturing. Like the Professor in Sylvie and Bruno, he felt that "it was easy to do it in a diagram," and had always longed for a blackboard in the pulpit. But he cleverly adopted the method of the "artists of the pavement" to his work, sketch- ing with extreme rapidity in coloured pastels the animals which he spoke of. In a few moments he would reproduce before his audience the gorgeous courting dress of a stickle- back, the section of a sperm whale, or the wings of a dragon- fly. He delivered the "Lowell Lectures" at Boston in 1883, and paid a second visit to the States in the following year, with less success. On his return, he continued his lecturing business until 1889, when he may be said to have died in harness, when on a tour in the North. We have said little of his daily life, of the rather poor payment for his work, or his great though unmethodical industry. The excellent biography by his son supplies this fully, with much bright anecdote taken from Wood's letters when on the American tour.

But it is by his writings, rather than by his personality, that Wood will be known, though the biography leaves no room to doubt that had he, like Frank Buckland, allowed his readers a closer acquaintance with himself, he might have enjoyed as great popularity.