The poet Gray as a naturalist

from the compulsion of necessity or of a profession, have employed themselves more steadily. There were not many fields of knowledge, with the exception of mathematics and the physical sciences, which he did not make his own. He read everything; and when his younger friend, the Reverend Norton NichoUs, ex- pressed surprise at the extent of his reading, he said, "Why should you be surprised, for I do nothing else.?" In reality Gray did much more than merely read; his "nothing else" took no account of the extraordinary range of copious and elaborate annotations which he made on the margins of his books, and in which the extent and thoroughness of his learning and the va- riety of his intellectual interests were abundantly displayed. Nor did it take account of his constant and careful observations of nature, and his exact records of them. He kept minute diaries, in which he entered daily notes on the weather, and recorded the opening of the flowers, the ripening of the harvests, the changes in the vegetation of the different seasons, the coming and departure of the birds, together with many miscellaneous remarks on the objects and aspects of nature.

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