36 Remarks on M. Bory de St- Vincent's 



The men of science in other parts of Europe have not 

 been able to resist this revolutionary contagion. Never con- 

 ceiving that to be able to view nature on the grand scale, and 

 to form a simple and lucid mode of arranging its objects, re- 

 quires a stretch of mind of which few men in an age are pos- 

 sessed, they take for granted the talent that is asserted, and 

 the presumption with which statements are offered for their 

 proof. The philosophical observer, not choosing to impugn 

 doctrines or systems which might involve him in unprofitable 

 controversies, remains silent ; and the crowd, dazzled by ap- 

 pearances of learning, and never doubting, but that he who 

 attempts to demolish an edifice, is able to rear a better in its 

 room, acquiesce in the asserted talents of the innovator. It 

 has, of course, become fashionable, in many parts of Europe, 

 to view nature through French spectacles, in place of looking 

 and judging through the medium of the eyes. 



Having premised these observations, which we make in the 

 utmost possible good humour, and with the highest feelings 

 of respect for many of our French friends, we now proceed to 

 give an instance of this disposition to fritter down science from 

 the Bulletin des Sciences Naturelles of the Baron de Ferus- 

 sac. In the number of that work for September last, and in 

 an article extracted from a " Classical Dictionary of Natural 

 History," conducted by M. le Colonel Bory de St-Vincent, 

 under the title of Man (Homo,) we have the human race, 

 until now considered as one,* divided into no less than fif- 

 teen species ! M. Bory has been led to make this division 

 from studying the subject deeply, and from materials collected 

 during twenty years for a Natural History of that seemingly 

 hitherto little known animal, Man. "The originalityof the plan 



* " There is but one species of the genus Man ; and all people of every 

 time, and every climate, with which we are acquainted, may have originat- 

 ed from one common stock. All national differences in the form and co- 

 lour of the human body are not more remarkable, nor more inconceivable, 

 than those by which varieties of so many other organized bodies, and par- 

 ticularly of domestic animals, arise, as it were, under our eyes. All these 

 differences, too, run so insensibly, by so many shades and transitions one 

 into the other, that it is impossible to separate them by any but very ar- 

 bitrary limits." — Blumenbach, Elem. Nat. Hist., trans, p. 35, 36. 



