344 Audubon’s Ornithology, First Volume. 
Botany, for instance, is no longer an overgrown accumulation 
of synonyms and absurdities. It no longer is deformed by t 
ignorance, the want of method, and the lack of fertility of in- 
vention of its historians, as it had been rendered by the followers 
of Linnzus. Entomology has taken rank, to which it is clearly 
entitled, as a distinct science. Ornithology is no longer the dry 
and repulsive study of uninteresting technicalities that it was in 
the day of the great Linnzeus, nor on the other hand does it suf- 
fer from the crude and ridiculous though eloquent and attractive 
theories of Buffon. And, although it may not have escaped the 
effects of the whimsical notions of modern systematists, it is still 
a science, upon the study of which few can enter without deri- 
ving from it delight, instruction and improvement. Comparative 
anatomy is no longer a despised and neglected pursuit, but is now 
recognized as a distinct science, and is rapidly becoming the 
basis of all zoological arrangement. Ichthyology has been so 
changed by separation of subjects no longer embraced by it, and 
by more than equivalent increases, that it may almost without 
exaggeration be regarded as having become an entirely new sci- 
ence. And that most interesting, most instructive, aye, and most 
profitable of all the natural sciences, geology, has sprung at once, 
as it were, into light and life. 
By sabes agency have all these surprising changes been effect- 
ed? By whom have all these things been accomplished in so brief 
aspace of time? By the munificence of what government, aided 
and directed by the persevering industry and intelligent investi- 
gations of what scientific associations, have these incredible 
changes been brought about ? It seems hardly possible, and yet 
it is strictly true, that all this astounding revolution, effected as 
it has been in the short space of half a century, has been brought 
about with hardly any aid from the patronage of governments, 
and with very limited and contracted assistance from the codpe- 
ration of scientific societies. True it is, both have lent their par- 
tial and of themselves ineffectual labors in promoting this great 
_ end, but both have been but as humble instruments to set in mo- 
tion a power far mightier than they. As the single spark will 
lala of powder, and thus becomes an instrument of suffi- 
soa humble as it may seem of itself, to destroy whole 
» 80 have the feeble but well directed efforts of the friends 
of science, by removing the mountain of popular prejudice that 
