Thomas George Bonney

Charles Lyell and Modern Geology Thomas George Bonney

Book Excerptstrong in most boys. He began with the lepidoptera, but before long took an interest in other insects, especially the aquatic. Fortunately his father had been for a time a collector, and possessed some good books on entomology, from the pictures in which Charles named his captures. This was, of course, an unscientific method, but it taught him to recognise the species and to know their habits. There are few better localities for lepidoptera, as every collector knows, than the New Forest, and some of the schoolboy's "finds" afterwards proved welcome to so well known an entomologist as Curtis. But when Charles returned to school he had to lay aside, for a season, the new hobby; for in those days a schoolboy's interest in natural history did not extend beyond birds'-nesting, and his little world was not less, perhaps even more frank and demonstrative than now, in its criticism of any innovation or peculiarity on the part of one of its members. The school at Salisbury appears to have been a preparatory one