164- STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 



other. Great revolutions in science are scarcely ever 

 effected but after their authors, and the generation 

 to which they belonged, have ceased to breathe. 

 Yet there is nothing unnatural or unaccountable 

 in the slowness of this removal of error. After 

 all, the authority of names, in questions of pure 

 science, is not what it used to be. It may, indeed, 

 for a time, operate against the diffusion of truth ; but 

 truth, once discovered, stands in no need of such 

 aid. During the age when the zoological world 

 bowed with unhesitating submission to the opinions 

 of the great naturalist of Sweden, it was affirmed 

 by him, and believed by the world, that corals were 

 plants, and that swallows passed the winter under 

 the ice.* Such prejudices are now only to be 

 laughed at: but we may fairly enquire whether 

 many of the opinions we now hold, will not equally 

 excite a smile from our successors. 



* The celebrated Peter Collinson thus writes to Linnaeus, 

 when opposing this latter prejudice: — " Your reputation is so 

 high in the opinion of the learned and curious of this age 

 (1762), that what you assert is taken and allowed to he a real 

 fact ; for when I have been reasoning on the improbability of 

 swallows living under water, it has been replied, Dr. Linnceus 

 says so, and will you dispute his authority." — Lin. Cor. vol. i. 

 p. 54, 55. 



