356 STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 
protection, and thus to reflect back upon such men 
a portion of the honour which their discoveries and 
inventions have cast upon the nation at large. We 
have now dispassionately enquired into the state of 
scientific patronage as it is manifested by other 
nations and by our own; and we have shown that 
the advancement of all sciences, in reality, stands in 
need of more efficient encouragement than that 
which may be expected from the public in general. 
There are a few considerations, however, which ren- 
der natural history particularly dependent, for its 
successful prosecution, upon the assistance and 
support of national institutions ; and these we shall 
now briefly enumerate. 
(245.) Natural history, in the) sense here taken, 
is restricted to zoology, botany, and mineralogy. 
And as these branches bear a very unequal influence 
in their relations to the practical purposes of life, 
so we must be understood, in the following observ- 
ations, to allude more to the former than the two 
latter. Mineralogy, indeed, which forms but a part 
of chemistry, may almost be considered the only 
division of natural history which, in an especial and 
obvious manner, is intimately connected with the 
wants and elegancies of life. The discovery and 
extraction of our mineral wealth—the separation and 
combination of fluids, and the uses to which they 
are then applied in medicine and in manufacturés— 
at once places mineralogy and chemistry in the 
rank of the most useful of all the branches of 
natural history. That discoveries, which eventually 
have proved extensively applicable to commerce, 
were never so suspected when their first rudiments 
