"
"And when your friend Mr. Bates works all his life long at observing,
and classifying lady-birds, I suppose that shows he is devoured by
sympathy for the race of beetles!"
I laughed at her comical face, she looked at me so quizzically. "But
then," I objected, "the cases are not parallel. Bates kills and collects
his lady-birds; Sebastian cures and benefits humanity."
Hilda smiled her wise smile once more, and fingered her apron. "Are the
cases so different as you suppose?" she went on, with her quick glance.
"Is it not partly accident? A man of science, you see, early in life,
takes up, half by chance, this, that, or the other particular form
of study. But what the study is in itself, I fancy, does not greatly
matter; do not mere circumstances as often as not determine it? Surely
it is the temperament, on the whole, that tells: the temperament that is
or is not scientific."
"How do you mean? You ARE so enigmatic!"
"Well, in a family of the scientific temperament, it seems to me, one
brother may happen to go in for butterflies--may he not?--and another
for geology, or for submarine telegraphs. Now, the man who happens to
take up butterflies does not make a fortune out of his hobby--there is
no money in butterflies; so we say, accordingly, he is an unpractical
person, who cares nothing for business, and who is only happy when he is
out in the fields with a net, chasing emperors and tortoise-shells.
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