16 STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY 
_ at this early period found pleasure in entomological 
recreations ; for we find in the title-page the names 
of two congenial friends, Edward Wotton and 
Thomas Penn, associated with his own as fellow- 
1abourers in the production of this curious volume. 
In a work of so early a date, we must not look for 
any great departure from the prolixity and credulity 
of contemporary writers, or any thing beyond the 
rude classification of separate groups into distinct 
caputs or chapters; overloaded, as was the fashion 
of the age, with heavy details of common truths, 
and obscured by a want of precision and by absurd 
fables, handed down by Pliny to all succeeding com- 
pilers. The contents, however, are so far digested 
as that the winged and the apterous orders form the 
two principal divisions of the work ; but then, in the 
latter, the author treats of caterpillars and grubs as 
if they were insects arrived at maturity, and of 
genuine worms as if they also were insects: the 
wood-cuts are many, but of great inferiority, even 
for the period of their execution; and they show 
how tardy the progress in England had yet been of 
the fine arts. It is worth while observing, that, with 
the exception of Belon, all the authors we have yet 
spoken of published their works in Latin: this, in 
fact, was then the universal language of learning and 
of science. Knowledge was chiefly confined to the 
ecclesiastical and the medical professions, and to 
those few of the higher orders who had been 
educated by the clergy; but the mass of the 
people, even those of the gentry and middle classes, 
were profoundly ignorant. ‘The religious establish- 
ments and the collegiate institutions were at the same 
