REMARKS. 



In presenting to the Zoologist this production of the Aris- 

 totle of the nineteenth century, the oracle of his science, it 

 is far from my intention to occupy his time by attempting to 

 show that it is not only the best source of knowledge to which 

 he can refer, that of Nature herself alone excepted, but that 

 it is the only one from which he can be certain of obtaining 

 it unmingled with the grossest error ^for this is universally 

 admitted. 



Divesting himself of the prejudices arising from a blind re- 

 verence for authority and a habit of imitation, our author has 

 brought all the free energies of his powerful and penetrating 

 mind to the investigation of his subject. Perceiving at once 

 the importance of the difference between the constant and 

 mutable characters of animals, aware of the harmony subsist- 

 ing between one constant character and another, and unap- 

 palled by the prospect of the almost endless labour that 

 awaited him, he resolved to expose them with the knife; ex- 

 pecting by the aid of comparative anatomy to arrive at facts 

 which would enable him to arrange the whole animal king- 

 dom, from Man to the last of the Infusoria, in its natural 

 order. How well he has succeeded, the precision with which 

 he has characterized insulated and mutilated fragments of 

 fossil bones of extinct species, and the reconstruction of the 

 whole of their gigantic frames from a part, this book, and the 

 common consent of the learned of all countries, amply testify. 

 He has accomplished the boast of Horace, he has erected the 

 altars of the science in the temple of Truth, and placed its 



