Bibliographical Notice, 439 



his undertaking, it must be admitted that, with some exceptions, to 

 which we shall hereafter advert, Dr. Baird has succeeded in producing 

 a tolerably satisfactory work, at least so far as the zoological and bo- 

 tanical articles are concerned ; — most of the mineralogical notices are 

 of little value, and many of them contain no information whatever. 



Even the zoological articles, however, are hardly so good as we 

 should have expected from a writer of Dr. Baird' s acknowledged 

 powers ; we should have been glad to see the characters of the great 

 groups of animals rather more definitely stated, and we have here 

 and there detected errors of greater or less importance in matters of 

 fact, which ought to have been familiar to the author's mind. Of 

 these we need only cite two or three instances. At p. 1/ we are 

 told that the true Crocodiles "are all found in the Old World," — a 

 statement which is contradicted by the author himself at pp. 1 77 

 and 178 ; at p. 279 the Hectocotylus is said to be the male of the 

 Cephalopods to which it belongs ; in common with most other writers. 

 Dr. Baird erroneously describes the viviparous Aphides as wingless ; 

 and at p. 262 he states that it is the female Stickleback that watches 

 its nest. In the same place, his words would indicate that the Gas- 

 terostens Spinachia alone of all the Sticklebacks is a nest-building 

 species ; although in the preceding page he gives a large woodcut of 

 the common G. aculeatus with its nest. The articles on the different 

 classes of monsters also appear to us to be quite out of place in a 

 work of this description. 



But we must pass from these minor matters to the consideration 

 oi a more serious and, to us, quite unexpected defect in the zoological 

 portion of this Cyclopaedia of the Natural Sciences, — a confusion 

 which will effectually prevent even the most laborious student from 

 acquiring any clear idea of zoological classification from its pages, and 

 which is evidently due to the author's having set about his task with 

 no definite system preconceived in his own mind. This is betrayed 

 even by the table of the classification of animals prefixed to his work, 

 according to which the animal kingdom consists only of three sub- 

 kingdoms, — the Vertebrata, Mollusca, and Articulata, — the latter 

 including everything from Insects to Sponges, and forming fourteen 

 classes numbered consecutively . At the first glance, we were doubtful 

 whether Dr. Baird might not have some hidden meaning in adopting 

 this course, — whether it might not be intended to indicate, that, the 

 position of the Echinodermata on one side or the other of the line of 

 demarcation between the Annulosa and Radiata being still a disputed 

 point, this line itself might be equally considered as mythical, and 

 therefore disregarded. Such an idea naturally sent us in all haste to 

 consult the body of the work, to see vi^hat reasons might be adduced 

 there in support of such revolutionary views ; but our curiosity was 

 doomed to be disappointed, the old subkingdoms of Articulata and 

 Radiata stood in their proper alphabetical rank ; and, to make the 

 matter worse, the line of demarcation was rendered more mythical 

 still by the Entozoa being cited as forming a class under both. Other 

 confusions of a similar nature occur frequently on comparing the 

 table of classification with the body of the work ; numerous groups 



L^^^uKfy-^^ 



