Biographical Memoir of Peter Simon Pallas. 225 



tail, furnished with long hairs like that of the iiorse, supplied 

 those marks of military dignity which the Turks have borrowed 

 from the Tartars, their ancestors *, and regarding the small yel- 

 lowish foxes of the deserts of the north of India, which some 

 have imagined to be the pretended auriferous ants of Herodotus-f. 



It is much to bo regretted that Buffon took no notice of these 

 valuable accounts of quadrupeds; their unaltered translation 

 would have formed a beautiful ornament to a work which Pal- 

 las took as his model, and to which he certainly is not inferior 

 in the parts which he has treated. 



It is impossible for us to enter into a detail of all the birds, 

 reptiles, fishes, moUusca, worms and zoophytes, of which he was 

 the first who published descriptions. The mere enumeration 

 of the numerous memoirs which he printed among those of the 

 academies of which he was a member, would much exceed the 

 limits that are prescribed to me. He was not even frightened 

 at the immense project of a general history of the animals and 

 plants of the Russian Empire, and had even put it in execution to 

 a great extent, although such an undertaking must have presented 

 more difficulties to him than any other. 



In fact, it was, so to speak, when on his journey that he be- 

 came a botanist ; for^ until then, the history of animals was the 

 study that he preferred. The descriptions of plants, also, wliich 

 accompany his journal, have incurred some censures ; but he 

 had scarcely arrived, when he engaged with ardour in this pur- 

 suit. The Empress, whose taste the Flora Rossica flattered by 

 its magnificence, ordered to be transmitted to the author the 

 herbaria collected before his time by the travellers that had been 

 sent out by the government, and took upon herself the expence 

 of the engraving and printing. He himself had made considerable 

 collections of plants, and the work promised to extend, in a re- 

 markable manner, our knowledge of the vegetable kingdom ; 

 but no more than two volumes of this work were published J, 

 which principally contain the trees and shrubs. There are only 

 a few plates of the third, because in Russia, as elsewhere, the 



• Bos grunniens. Act. Petrop. I. Part. ii. p. 332. 

 •f- Canis Corsac, Neue Nordische Beytrage, i. p. 29. 



+ Flora Rossica, seu Stirpium Imperii Rossici, per Europam et Asiam indi- 

 genaruni, Descriptiones et Icones. Folio. Petersburg, 1784 and 1788» « 



