404? Sketch of the Scope, Offices, 



the splendid machinery of suns and systems that sublime study 

 embraced ; the atmosphere and its constituents ; pneumatics, 

 which related to the density, compressibility, and elasticity of 

 aerial fluids; meterology, which embraced all atmospheric 

 phenomena; hydrology, or the doctrine of water; and hydraulics 

 and hydrostatics, which related to its motion, pressure, and 

 gravity ; were all important branches of natural history. If, 

 however, we confined the subject to its more popular accepta- 

 tion, as embracing a knowledge of the earth and its produc- 

 tions ; even here was employment for a devoted life of research, 

 in the collection, arrangement, and classification of these pro- 

 ductions, which were the more legitimate province of natural 

 history. Even if confined to the museum, zoology, botany, 

 and geology, all presented their united productions to enchain 

 and fascinate the attention of the student. He should not 

 here stop further to enter upon the definition of the various 

 branches of that study, which was developed in detail by the 

 members of that Society to which he had the honour to belong; 

 but he asked them, looking upon Nature with a " poet's 

 eye," to glance one moment with him at that view of the sub- 

 ject which of necessity came home to all their hearts, he 

 meant the poetry of natural history, or that pictorial delinea- 

 tion of natural objects which, like the breeze upon the aching 

 forehead, came to reanimate and refresh all their faculties. 

 This was the charm of poetry : without it all the pomp and 

 circumstance of war and pageantry were vain, and fiction itself 

 became tiresome unrelieved by those descriptions of natural 

 objects, which were like the sparkling jewels to the metal in 

 which they were set. All true poets, from Homer to Byron 

 and Scott, had felt and acted upon this principle. Hence the 

 beauty of those images which recalled the recollections of our 

 father-land, when rolling oceans or distant regions intervened ; 

 and the sight of a single natural object, or a passing sound, 

 was sufficient to effect this. But the man of genius took a 

 higher flight; he gazed upon the objects of nature with an 

 anxiety to subject all their powers to the dominion of man, 

 and render them subservient ministers to his manual designs, 

 or to the stores of his knowledge. Hence the philosopher 

 would quit the earth if it were possible, to follow the comet 

 in its erratic career, return along its orbit with the speed of 

 thought, and lay down rules for its governance and guidance. 

 Thus the systematist, in his catalogues, developed the animation 

 of the world ; and the extended observer of Nature stored 

 up all her images in his breast for his descriptions, and was 

 thus, in effect, monarch of all he surveyed. For him the sun 

 rose in radiant pomp above the snowy peaks of the Alps. For 



