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 liis own as fellow- 

 labourers 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 



