438 STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 
cisions of the council in their other awards, or to 
hazard an opinion how far the .censures passed 
against it by others are well or ill deserved, for these 
questions relate to branches of science upon which 
we are ignorant ; but in our own walk we may be al- 
lowed to form and to express an opinion, and it is 
this —that the discovery alluded to (which, we may 
fairly suppose, was unknown to the council of the 
Royal Society) is, in natural history, what that of 
gravitation is in astronomy. If this developement 
of the first great law of natural arrangement has not 
yet been seen in its true magnitude, it is because 
our naturalists, absorbed in the minutiz of details, 
shrink from the complicated and severe researches 
necessary for its verification. We should have re- 
joiced, had the imperishable fame, which future ages 
will bestow upon him who achieved so brilliant a 
generalisation, been anticipated by the Royal Society 
of Great Britain: yet at the eleventh hour an uninten- 
tional act of injustice may still be rectified: and we 
believe, that the council, upon further enquiry, will 
admit the validity of our objection. We feel quite 
satisfied that the illustrious president, no less than 
his advisers, will not be backward in awarding, upon 
a future occasion, to the first philosophic zoologist 
this country has ever produced, that honour which 
will most assuredly be bestowed upon him by pos- 
terity. 
(301.) The Linnean Society, as far as concerns 
the cultivation of zoology, is the first in Great 
Britain; whether as regards seniority of date, the 
scientific rank of its members, or the value of its 
published Transactions. The unostentatious and 
