4. STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 
animals. It has been the misfortune of those who 
have written —in some respects ably — upon the 
rise and progress of zoology, that this distinction 
has either not been perceived, or has been entirely 
set aside. Hence it has resulted that praise and 
blame have been frequently misapplied; while 
discoveries of the highest interest have been quite 
overlooked in the fancied importance attached to 
the maker of a system, or to the industry of a- 
nomenclator. Without, at present, entering further 
into these essential differences between the labours 
of naturalists, we must bear in mind that all true 
knowledge of the laws of natural combination takes 
its rise from minute analysis; and that the value of 
a system is to be judged of according to the degree 
with which it arranges in harmonious order, all 
the various and infinitely diversified facts resulting 
from analysis. Of artificial systems there may be 
no end, because the materials of which they are 
composed show a diversity of relations: each system 
may differ from the other, yet each may have some- 
thing to recommend it. But with the materials 
employed for their construction the case is quite 
different: the analysis of a species, if correctly made, 
remains for ever, unchangeable and unchanged: it 
is permanent; it cannot be gainsaid, nor does it 
perish with the system into which it may be incor- 
porated. The system may be overthrown, yet the 
analysis remains. True it is that minute research is 
of more easy accomplishment than the power of ge- 
neralising: the one requires only a simple accuracy 
of observation, the other an enlarged and compre- 
hensive judgment. But, when once asystem, like that 
