FRANCIS WILLUGHBY. 37 



and fishing. Alexander also took with him, on 

 his Asiatic expedition, more than a thousand 

 persons for the same purpose. But these un- 

 paralleled advantages owed their chief value to 

 the powers of the philosopher's mind, and to the 

 system of inquiry which he applied to the ani- 

 mal kingdom, a system employed, but not 

 improved, by Bacon and Newton in their several 

 researches. 



He possessed also that other rare, but indis- 

 pensable qualification, a mind totally devoid of 

 prejudice. He utterly discarded every tradition 

 of his countrymen respecting any animal, how- 

 ever venerable that animal had become by the 

 connection with it of their religious belief. 

 Actuated by the same perfect love of truth, he 

 adopted the most literal description of facts, 

 instead of the rhetorical style*employed by other 

 teachers of philosophy, not excepting his own 

 venerated instructor. According to some writers, 

 he must have composed more than four hundred 

 treatises, of which no more than forty-eight are 

 extant, and not one of these in a perfect state. 



His history of animals, four volumes octavo, 

 which it is most congruous to the object of this 

 sketch to notice, is, in the judgment of an emi- 

 nent naturalist, " composed in a method so 

 luminous, as not yet to have been equalled by 

 any subsequent writer." The principal divisions 

 which are still adopted by naturalists in the ani- 

 mal kingdom are those of Aristotle ; and he pro- 

 posed some, which have been resumed after 



