356 STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 



protection, and thus to reflect back upon such men 

 a portion of the honour which their discoveries and 

 inventions have cast upon the nation at large. We 

 have now dispassionately enquired into the state of 

 scientific patronage as it is manifested by other 

 nations and by our own ; and we have shown that 

 the advancement of all sciences, in reality, stands in 

 need of more efficient encouragement than that 

 which may be expected from the public in general. 

 There are a few considerations, however, which ren- 

 der natural history particularly dependent, for its 

 successful prosecution, upon the assistance and 

 support of national institutions ; and these we shall 

 now briefly enumerate. 



(245.) Natural history, in the) sense here taken, 

 is restricted to zoology, botany, and mineralogy. 

 And as these branches bear a very unequal influence 

 in their relations to the practical purposes of life, 

 so we must be understood, in the following observ- 

 ations, to allude more to the former than the two 

 latter. Mineralogy, indeed, which forms but a part 

 of chemistry, may almost be considered the only 

 division of natural history which, in an especial and 

 obvious manner, is intimately connected with the 

 wants and elegancies of life. The discovery and 

 extraction of our mineral wealth — the separation and 

 combination of fluids, and the uses to which they 

 are then applied in medicine and in manufactures — 

 at once places mineralogy and chemistry in the 

 rank of the most useful of all the branches of 

 natural history. That discoveries, which eventually 

 have proved extensively applicable to commerce, 

 were never so suspected when their first rudiments 



