438 STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 



cisions of the council in their other awards, or to 

 hazard an opinion how far the censures passed 

 against it by others are well or ill deserved, for these 

 questions relate to branches of science upon which 

 we are ignorant ; but in our own walk we may be al- 

 lowed to form and to express an opinion, and it is 

 this — that the discovery alluded to (which, we may 

 fairly suppose, was unknown to the council of the 

 Royal Society) is, in natural history, what that of 

 gravitation is in astronomy. If this developement 

 of the first great law of natural arrangement has not 

 yet been seen in its true magnitude, it is because 

 our naturalists, absorbed in the minutiae of details, 

 shrink from the complicated and severe researches 

 necessary for its verification. We should have re- 

 joiced, had the imperishable fame, which future ages 

 will bestow upon him who achieved so brilliant a 

 generalisation, been anticipated by the Royal Society 

 of Great Britain : yet at the eleventh hour an uninten- 

 tional act of injustice may still be rectified : and we 

 believe, that the council, upon further enquiry, will 

 admit the validity of our objection. We feel quite 

 satisfied that the illustrious president, no less than 

 his advisers, will not be backward in awarding, upon 

 a future occasion, to the first philosophic zoologist 

 this country has ever produced, that honour which 

 will most assuredly be bestowed upon him by pos- 

 terity. 



(301.) The Linnaean Society, as far as concerns 

 the cultivation of zoology, is the first in Great 

 Britain ; whether as regards seniority of date, the 

 scientific rank of its members, or the value of its 

 published Transactions. The unostentatious and 



