12 [LECTURES 



his figures and plates which illustrated them. We musi 

 remember, though, that the time had not yet arrived 

 when ease, grace, artistic skill and accuracy were thrown 

 into zoological illustrations. In birds, the world had to 

 wait for Audubon to demonstrate the manner in which 

 that was to be accomplished. 



Sir Hans Sloane, who was born in Ireland in April, 

 1660, and died at Chelsea early in January, 1752, was a 

 stanch promoter of the cause of science. He is espe- 

 cially to be remembered as, after his death, his enormous 

 private collections of objects in natural history formed 

 the nucleus from which the British Museum afterward 

 developed and grew. 



The year 1683 produced also a remarkable man in 

 France, the genius of whose work reaches down to the 

 present time. This was Rene Antoine Ferchault de 

 Reaumur, a man who not only greatly advanced the 

 science of biology but in addition made a powerful im- 

 press upon nearly every other branch of learning of his 

 day. As you well know he invented an admirable scale 

 for one of the styles of thermometers still in use in many 

 parts of the world. Reaumur completed and published 

 in 6 volumes a work upon insects, and left several others 

 incomplete and unpublished, which is very much 

 to be regretted as much of his work is very valuable. 

 Some of his philosophy in those memoirs would 

 hardly hold good at the present day. In 

 speaking of insects, he says: "The number of 

 observations necessary for a tolerably complete history of 

 so many minute animals is prodigious. When one re- 

 flects on all that an accomplished botanist ought to know, 

 it is enough to frighten him. His memory is loaded with 

 the names of twelve or thirteen thousand plants, and he 

 is expected to be able to recall on occasion the image of 

 any one of them. There is, perhaps, none of these plants 

 that has not insects peculiar to itself; and some trees, 

 such as the oak, give substance to several hundreds of 

 different species. And, after all, how many are there 

 that do not live on plants! How many species that de- 

 vour others! How many that live at the expense of 

 larger animals, on which they feed continually! How 

 many species are there, some of which pass the greater 

 part of their time in water, while others pass it entirely 

 there! The immensity of Nature's works is nowhere 

 more apparent than in the prodigious multiplicity 

 of these species of little animals." He then 

 proceeds to show the utter impossibility of man ever 



