398 Mr. N. A. Vigors oji the Islatural Affinities 



successfully developed by the distinguished individual to whom 

 I allude, before a Society which is familiarized with the principles 

 in question. It is sufficient in these few preliminary observations 

 to refer to the great revolution which the publication of these 

 principles has effected in zoology. It has raised the science to 

 that elevated rank among the subjects of human research, to 

 which, whatever might have been its intrinsic claims, it was 

 seldom, from the alleged minuteness of its views, allowed to 

 assert its pretensions. The investigation of Nature has ceased 

 to be a mere work of observation : the mind becomes as much 

 employed as the eye ; and the intellectual character of the 

 science as undeniably unfolds itself, as its general usefulness, or 

 its acknowledged powers of affording delight. It is no longer 

 devoted merely to minute and limited details, but to grand and 

 sublime combinations ; no longer to the investigation of the pro- 

 perties of the individual, but to that of the place which this fills 

 and the part it sustains in the great system of Nature. The diffu- 

 sion of these principles wrought the same change as may be sup- 

 posed to have affected the views of the early astronomer, when his 

 attention was withdrawn from the mere observation of the splen- 

 did orbs of the firmament, from conjecturing their apparent sta- 

 tions, and summing up their various names, to the more sublime 

 contemplation of the harmonious system in which they revolve 

 through infinite space. But the developement of this theory 

 went still further. To those persons who were induced to seek 

 a more intimate acquaintance with the works of Nature by the 

 noblest, and indeed only legitimate end of all such research — 

 the desire of studying " the wisdom of God in the creation," — 

 a new source of delight was thrown open, a new region of won- 

 der revealed ; as they were now enabled to trace that wisdom not 

 merely in the detail, — not merely in the beautifully combined 

 mechanism of an isolated object, — but in the comprehensive 



system 



