But to horses. Readers of The Brook will recall that charming episode of the colt which Philip Willows sold to the squire, a colt whose elaborate pedigree is so amusingly detailed. The whole passage is strikingly English, and could have been written only by a man who loves a good horse, and is fully in touch with the principle of heredity. So, as a specimen of the poet's familiarity with equine ways we may quote:

He laugh'd, and I, though sleepy, like a horse
That hears his corn bin open, prick'd my ears.

This and other references speak for themselves.

For still we moved

Together, twinn'd as horse's ear and eye.

Feeding like horses when you hear them feed.

Tennyson has studied the ways of dogs-their love of fighting, their attachment to man, their addiction to dreaming, their detestation of rats. He has even seen a litter of puppies and noted their characteristic trembling.

Then from the plaintive mother's teat he took
Her blind and shuddering puppies, naming each.

As the dog

With inward yelp and restless forefoot plies

His function of the woodland.

Like a dog, he hunts in dreams.

Scott, in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, had already

used this observation :

The staghounds, weary with the chase,

Lay stretched upon the rushy floor,

And urged, in dreams, the forest race

From Teviotstone to Eskdale Moor.

Take next a graphic description of an interrupted

dog-fight :

As the cur,

Pluckt from the cur he fights with, ere his cause
Be cool'd by fighting, follows, being named,
His owner, but remembers all and growls
Remembering.

In Geraint and Enid two spearmen advance,

Each growling like a dog, when his good bone
Seems to be pluck'd at by the village boys,
Who love to vex him eating, and he fears
To lose his bone, and lays his foot upon it,
Gnawing and growling.

This is a finely-worded description of a commonplace incident; still better is that vivid picture where Gawain, seeing a villainy done, forbore,

But in his heat and eagerness

Trembled and quivered, as the dog, withheld

A moment from the vermin that he sees
Before him, shivers, ere he springs and kills.

The foregoing passage makes it clear that Tennyson was present at a rat-worrying competition, perhaps in his undergraduate days at Cambridge,

While all these excerpts are interesting enough, they hardly belong to natural science proper, except in so far as every careful and accurate observation, if correctly put into words, is the foundation of scientific truth. We must now turn to Geology

-a science which Tennyson has studied with profit to his poetry. He has dabbled in all the sciences, and has drawn inspiration and suggestions from Astronomy, Electricity, Spectrum Analysis, as well as from the Nebular Hypothesis.

We begin with that humorous description of a pigeon pie in Audley Court:

A pasty costly made,

Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay
Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks
Imbedded and injellied.

A very happy use of simile, ludicrously degrading to the great science of Geology, and apt to be thrown away upon those who have never seen a rock thick with embedded Trilobites. In Sir Walter Vivian's abbey there lay

Huge Ammonites and the first bones of Time.

Fossils again; and how skilfully Tennyson gets over the difficulty of the "unlovely names," Megalosaurians, Plesiosaurians, and so on. He shows the same ingenuity in The Princess :—

That afternoon the Princess rode to take
The dip of certain strata to the North.

And in the outcrop by the river-bed, there

Stuck out

The bones of some vast bulk that liv'd and roar'd

Before man was.

A little farther on we are treated to a charming description of a geological excursion, which is so well done that we must conclude that Tennyson himself was once a member of a field club or attended a class in field-geology.

We wound

About the cliffs, the copses, out and in,

Hammering and clinking, chattering stony names
Of shale and hornblende, rag and trap and tuff,
Amygdaloid and trachyte.

Here he masters with rare skill the difficulty of the hard names, and that without sacrificing a jot of the truth.

Or like an old-world mammoth bulk'd in ice,

Not to be molten out.

Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime.

These extracts show that the poet has tried to realise the prehistoric times when monsters trod the earth and battened upon each other. realises, too, the cruelty of Nature and the vanish

He

ing in the struggle for existence of many types of animal life.

"So careful of the type ? but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, "A thousand types are gone :

I care for nothing, all shall go".

-(In Memoriam, lvi.).

Our closing passage in this connection must be those two well-known stanzas from In Memoriam (cxxiii.) describing the changes that the earth's surface has undergone-the constant disintegration of the solid land and the equally constant building up that follows. The extract shows a fine geological instinct and knowledge, and, as always, a unique power of expression, which never fails him.

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.

O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

There, where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands ;
They melt like mist, the solid lands

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

This reads almost like a gloss upon a passage in Sir Archibald Geikie's recent work, Landscape in History—a passage in which he tells how he “found