RISE AND PROGRESS OF ZOOLOGY. 51 



popularity ; and his works may be perused, even 

 now, with pleasure and advantage. Although he 

 must have greatly contributed to extend a taste for 

 these pursuits, yet his example assisted, without 

 doubt, to throw upon our succeeding writers those 

 fetters of implicit obedience to the authority of 

 Linnaeus, which every fresh example more firmly 

 riveted ; until at length it was deemed a sort of heresy 

 to propose a new division, or to name a new genus. 

 Pennant for many years held a constant corre- 

 spondence with the ingenious and amiable White 

 of Selborne; who, though not a professed writer 

 upon systematic natural history, contributed very 

 much to the information of Pennant, and whose 

 popular and interesting letters have recently been 

 published by so many different editors. White, in 

 short, was one of those very few who then devoted 

 his attention to the observance of nature, without 

 making any attempt to generalise the facts so ac- 

 quired. Natural history, to such observers, is but a 

 mere amusement, fascinating indeed, and even use- 

 ful, but totally disconnected with the objects of phi- 

 losophic science. Entomology, which had been so 

 much advanced on the Continent by the figures of 

 Rcesel, Sulzer, Sepp, and Schaeffer, and by the scien- 

 tific volume of Scopoli, now began to make some 

 progress in England ; more indeed by the admirable 

 figures of Moses Harris, than by the descriptions 

 which accompanied them in the three volumes of 

 Drury's Exotic Insects * ; the first of which appeared 



* Illustrations of Natural History. By D. Drury. Lon- 

 don, 1770—1772. 3 vols. 4to. 



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