99 STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 
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of different degrees of merit, and have never perhaps 
been united in one person, yet they are both essential 
to the perfection of our science. Swammerdam 
sunk into an early grave, before he could give to 
the world the result of his labours ; and but for the 
patriotic feeling and the munificent liberality of the 
great Boerhaave, his manuscripts, drawings, and 
engravings would probably never have seen the 
light. Were it not customary to date the different 
stages of this science from the periods when parti- 
cular systems of arrangement were in vogue, we 
should consider that a new era was commenced by 
Swammerdam, rather than by Ray; for the one 
enriched science with a mass of important facts, 
entirely and absolutely new ; while the other merely 
employed these facts to construct a system, and this 
system chiefly modelled from that already sketched 
out by Aristotle. The original edition of Swam- 
merdam’s incomparable volume, in Latin and Dutch, 
was published at Leyden, under the superintendence 
of Boerhaave, in 1738; and it at length obtained 
so much reputation, that an English translation* 
appeared twenty years afterwards. We have intro- 
duced the name of Swammerdam in this part of our 
history because he was the contemporary of Goedart, 
Merrett, and Lister; and was prosecuting his re- 
searches at the same time, although science received 
no benefit from his discoveries until many years after. 
(12.) Resuming, therefore, the thread of our 
narrative from the rude performance of Merrett, 

* The Book of Nature; or, the History of Insects. By 
John Swammerdam. Translated by Thomas Floyd. Revised, 
&e. by John Hill, M.D. London, 1758, 1 val. folia. 
