376 Bibliographical Notices. 



genera of animals and plants within the compass of anything short of 

 a small library, must prove an entire failure. The observer of struc- 

 ture and habit, on the other hand, requires a guide-book through the 

 intricacies of his subject, a compendious account of the actual state 

 of science, a something to tell him what to observe, and to prevent 

 his falling into the errors to which isolated observers are so liable, but 

 which the light accumulated by the labours of his predecessors may 

 to a great extent enable him to avoid. Such a work as this is still 

 a desideratum in English scientific literature, for the labours of the 

 present authors have been directed to quite another result. They 

 have in fact fulfilled neither of the conditions which we have already 

 seen to be necessary in a ' Manual of Natural History,' — their work 

 is a bare sketch of a classification carried as far as the natural fami- 

 lies, dealing no further with the structure of animals and plants than 

 as it furnishes characters for the foundation of groups ; it may in fact 

 he defined as an engine for naming natural objects, which carries the 

 student just half way, and then leaves him to find the remainder of 

 the road by himself. 



This objection would have applied with less force, had the space 

 at the commencement of each of the larger divisions (of the animal 

 kingdom at least), now devoted to a series of desultory generalities, 

 not always perfectly correct, been made use of to furnish the reader 

 with some general views of the natural history of the creatures under 

 consideration ; but as it is, the observer who may witness any isolated 

 fact in the history of an animal, even should he be able to ascertain 

 the family to which it belongs from this book, can never hope to find 

 in it any clue to the series of pheenomena with which the fact 

 observed may stand in connection. 



Before proceeding to examine the details of the book, we have to 

 protest against a piece of pedantry which pervades the whole, and for 

 which the authors appear to consider themselves deserving of great 

 credit, — we allude to the practice of giving what are called English 

 names to the different groups. If indeed good genuine English names 

 could be invented for every group and species of animals and plants, 

 Ave should have nothing more to say upon the subject, but we enter- 

 tain the very strongest objection to the absurdities generally palmed 

 off upon us under this title, and in this respect the present work is 

 not one whit superior to its predecessors. We meet with the same 

 attempts at Anglicizing by simply altering the termination of words 

 from a or cb into ans ; whilst the necessity for manufacturing names 

 for so many minor groups has produced an infinity of multi-verbal 

 combinations, which we should think would tend rather to repel than 

 to attract a beginner. We cannot imagine a mind so constituted as 

 to find such names as " Long-legged herbivorous Beetles," or " Hard- 

 skinned serricorn Beetles," more expressive and easy of recollection 

 than the corresponding scientific terms "Eupoda" and " Sternoxi ;" 

 and in some cases the English names are positive misnomers, as for 

 example the term " Gill-lunged Batrachians," applied to those sin- 

 gular members of the class Batrachia in which gills and lungs are 

 coexistent in the mature state. 



