INTRODUCTION. 75 



ciate the station which he holds in the great scale 

 of nature. 



Now, although this study imposed upon man 

 somewhat of a duty, the science of natural history 

 was comparatively unknown to the ancients ; nor 

 was its interest and importance recognised in their 

 systems of knowledge. With the exception of 

 Aristotle, neither the philosophers of antiquity, nor 

 those of the ages succeeding the revival of learning, 

 prosecuted the study of living nature with that 

 accuracy of observation, and reference to organic 

 structure, so indispensably necessary for distinguish- 

 ing by just analogy, and determining by definite 

 characters, the classes, orders, genera, and species, 

 of the vast assemblage of animated beings. 



Within the first quarter of the last century, there 

 were still writers, and there were religious institu- 

 tions in force, classing otters, seals, whales, herons, 

 and ducks, with fish ; and in law we even now ad- 

 mit whales by that name ; while, in our markets, 

 oysters, limpets, lobsters, and crabs, continue to be 

 called shell-fish. In this respect, notwithstanding 

 the valuable example placed before him by the 

 mighty Stagyrite, we find the great Buffon viewed 

 nature, and in particular zoology, more in the man- 

 ner of a rhetorician, who had discovered a new 

 field of eloquence, than as a true naturalist, who 

 sees the connecting links of affinity, and by them 

 demonstrates the relations organised bodies have 

 to each other. In his magnificent descriptions of 

 animals, he long persisted to disregard all classifi- 





