92 STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 



Four years after, a celebrated botanist of Germany, 

 E. Fries, equally ignorant of the previous discovery 

 of M'Leay, announced the same fact as manifested in 

 the vegetable world, and which he demonstrates by a 

 much more extensive analysis than had been given, 

 in regard to insects, in the Horce Entomologicce. It 

 is not the least remarkable circumstance connected 

 with this splendid discovery, that four individuals, 

 in different countries, and unknown to each other, 

 should all have directed their studies to the same 

 object, and that all should have arrived at the same 

 result : thus establishing, what had never yet been 

 done, the existence of at least one universal law 

 in natural arrangement, and thus raising zoology, 

 for the first time, to the rank of a demonstrative 

 science. 



(40.) This era, then, of our science has just com- 

 menced, and here must we close our sketch. It is 

 not expedient that the historian should continue his 

 narrative, when he himself becomes an actor upon the 

 stage. We therefore resign to another pen the task 

 of recording the passing events in the history of our 

 science, and proceed to trace its influence on the 

 moral and practical duties of life. 



