46 LETTERS TO HIS BROTHER 



lendar, and interesting coincidences ; for the generality of 

 readers are apt to skip over whatever looks like figures. Your 

 journal will be pretty long. An index perhaps has never en- 

 tered into your head ; yet such a thing may be expected in so 

 large a work. You may no doubt, if you please, invent your 

 system as well as Brown. You are not sworn to follow the 

 arrangement of Linn. By that means the subject certainly rises 

 on the reader. The Swedes admire Brown notwithstanding. 

 Faunce Calpensis primitice will no doubt be more modest ; yet 

 might your full history well deserve to be called a Fauna. In 

 strictness Linn.'s Fauna Suec. is no more a perfect Fauna than 

 your own, since some hundreds of animals must still have 

 escaped his observation. Bro. Ben objects to a Latin title to 

 an English book. Suppose you call it, ' Fauna Cal., or a Zool. 

 Hist, of Gib.' &c. ; for Natural Hist, it must not be called, since 

 the plants are wanting. There is such a spirit gone forth 

 against whatever is Linnaean, that I would not make the title 

 page Linnaean. Your bookseller must be consulted a little in 

 the title page and advertisements, as he knows best how to 

 throw in little savoury and alluring circumstances to quicken 

 the appetite of your buyer. By no means should you print, 

 Bro. Tho. and I both think, 'til you have sold your copy : book- 

 sellers know how to subscribe off an impression to the trade, 

 and to throw cold water on a work lying on the author's hand. 

 We do by no means like your " sequimur patrem," &c. : you 

 should have mottos relative to each class. Ovid, perhaps, 

 somewhere among his monsters will furnish for the Vermes. 

 Pray correspond with Padre Floroz, since Linn, will no longer 

 write*. We can by no means see how you can be off from 

 bringing up your work yourself : for no person will purchase 

 what they have not seen ; besides one hour's conversation will 

 do more business than an hundred letters. Might not Benj. 

 print and publish for you on the usual terms? We wish to 

 see your papers, and to correct here and there, not out of 

 vanity and a meddling temper, but because little errors un- 



* [In May 1774 Linnaeus had his first attack of apoplexy, from TS liicli 

 he never wholly recovered. T. B.] 



