OF BARON CUVIER. 1,3 



power of drawing great and striking conclusions, from an 

 infinity of careful investigations : the history of fishes not 

 only exhibits the same faculties, exerted in a long continued 

 series of anatomical inquiries, but also as a display of literary 

 acquirements, exceeds all his former productions in eru- 

 dition. No source of information bearing upon the subject is 

 overlooked, whether occupying a series of volumes or met 

 with in a casual sentence ; whether to be sought in the clas- 

 sical pages of antiquity, or in a modern pamphlet published 

 in some obscure corner of Europe. 



It is in the review of the origin and progress of Ichthyology, 

 prefixed to the history, that we become fully sensible of the 

 magnitude of the writer's labours in this department alone. 

 There we perceive with what critical sagacity he investigates 

 every relative document, from those of the earliest antiquity 

 to the present time , and traces out what is derived from a 

 predecessor, and what is new in each. Our limits forbid us 

 to enter so largely as we could wish, into his luminous and 

 characteristic abstract, of all the real information, professedly 

 or incidentally communicated by the ancients. From the 

 period when Aristotle laid the foundation of the natural 

 sciences, the author enumerates a succession of Greek and 

 Latin writers, with a few words of their biography, and a 

 synoptical view of what relates to his subject in their writ- 

 ings, though most of them were satisfied with commenting on 

 the Stagyrite, scarcely ever adding a single new fact from 

 their own observation '. Among the works thus referred to 



1 Homer is mentioned on account of yvafnrToiQ ayiciGrpoiaiv ; Hesiod for 

 the fisherman on the shield of Hercules ; Plato, Archestratus, Theophras- 

 tus, Erasistratus, Clearchus, Varro, Columella, Pliny, Oppian, Athenseus, 

 iElian, Ausonius, Strabo, Pausanias, Plutarch, Dioscorides, Galen, Ori- 

 basius, &c. From comparing the whole the Baron infers that the ancients 

 were acquainted with about 1 50 species of fish, nearly all that are edible 

 in the Mediterranean. 



