Page:Dick Sands the Boy Captain.djvu/20

 DICK SANDS, THE BOY CAPTAIN. into his very nature ; yet this very helplessness made him an object of kind considération rather than of contempt, and Mrs. Weldon looked upon him as a kind of elder brothcr to her little Jack. It must not be supposed, however, that Cousin Benedict was eithcr idle or unoccupied. On the contrary, his vvhole time was devoted to one absorbing passion for natural history. Not that he had any large claim to be regarded properly as a natural historian ; he had made no excursions over the whole four districts of zoology, botany, mineralogy, and geology, into which the realms of natural history are commonly divided ; indeed, he had no pretensions at ail to be either a botanist, a mineralogist, or a geologist ; his studies only sufficedto make him a'zoologist, and that in a very limited sensé. No Cuvier was he ; he did not aspire to décompose animal life by analysis, and to recompose it by synthesis ; his enthusiasm had not made him at ail deeply versed in vertebrata, mollusca, or radiata ; in fact, the vertebrata — animais, birds, reptiles, fishes — had had no place în his researches ; the mollusca — from the cephalopoda to the bryozia — had had no attractions for him ; nor had he consumed the midnight oil in investigating the radiata, the echinodermata, acalephae, polypî, entozoa, or infusoria. No ; Cousin Benedict's interest began and ended with the articulata ; and it must be owned at once that his studies were very far from embracing ail the range of the six classes into which " articulata " are subdivided ; viz., the insecta, the myriapoda, the arachnida, the crustacea, the cirrhopoda, and the anelides ; and he was utterly unable în scientific language to distinguish a worm from a lecch, ^ an earwig from a sea-acorn, a spider from a scorpion, a shrimp from a frog-hopper, or a galley-worm from a centi- pede. To confess the plain truth, Cousin Benedict was an amateur entomologist, and nothing more. Entomology, if may be asserted, is a wide science ; it embraces the whole division of the articulata ; but our friend was an entomologist only in the limited sensé of the popular acceptatioir of the word ; that is to say, he was an