4 NATURAL SYSTEMS : 



style, and offering a systematic arrangement such as all 

 could readily understand, contributed more than those 

 of any other naturalist to the spread of a taste for his 

 favourite science. He was eminently a popular writer, 

 and, no matter what criticism may now be passed on his 

 system, it must be admitted that to it is greatly owing 

 the rapidity with which the natural sciences advanced 

 in public favour in the early part of last century. Had 

 his followers possessed a tithe of his comprehensive and 

 singularly penetrating mind, they would have saved his 

 memory from many an undeserved reproach. No man 

 ever had a truer eye for a natural group, or was more 

 deeply impressed with the value of a natural system. 

 He has indeed left us, in his Genera, especially of 

 Insects and Shells, grand outlines of such a system, 

 sketched by a master's hand. But he felt that the time 

 for erecting the temple of Nature had not come, and that 

 his own province lay in preparing materials for the 

 building, and to this task he devoted the chief energies 

 of his mind. 



We of the present generation are, perhaps, too apt to 

 think that sumcient materials have already been amassed, 

 and to set ourselves often with but a very superficial 

 knowledge of even a single department of a single 

 science to work out a system which shall embrace a 

 much wider field, perhaps one that shall attempt to be 

 a System of Nature. Hence the numerous systems, all 

 called "natural," which have been proposed, both in 

 Zoology and Botany, within the last fifty years. Hence, 

 too, the still stranger systems and anti-systems which 

 the history of Geology exhibits, where the same fact 



