14 LECTURES 



utmost importance to horticulturalists the world over, 

 wherever their works have come known and appre- 

 ciated. Moreover their published accounts of the habits 

 and development of insects are of value in no end of other 

 ways, and explain many practical and theoretical ques- 

 tions. 



To return now to the middle of the Seventeenth Cen- 

 tury, we find that meanwhile an ever-increasing host of 

 workers in the service of anotomy have attained to many 

 glorious results. Through the labors of Asellius, Glisson, 

 Jolyffe, the Englishmen, and Rudbeck, the Swede (the 

 last two who divided honors upon the distinction between 

 the lacteals and the lymphatics), Willis, who carefully 

 studied the nervous system, and Malpighi, who devoted 

 himself principally to histology, and to Steno, Ruysch, 

 Swammerdam, who has already been noticed, and to a 

 hundred others the very refinements of anatomical re- 

 searches were being then annually published. A com- 

 plete knowledge of man's structure was rapidly being 

 gotten at; and, what is fully as important, a very general 

 comparative knowledge of the morphology of many other 

 animals was likewise having a powerful light thrown 

 upon it, and with the effect of very materially 

 elaborating \vhat was already known in such fields. 

 It was through these latter studies, supplemented as 

 they were by the descriptions of mammals by the natural- 

 ists of the time, that the science of mammalogy was kept 

 fully abreast the other departments of natural history. 

 Comparative physiology, ichthyology, invertebrate 

 zoology, herpetology, and ornithology were also advanced 

 by more or less similar methods, though no one of them 

 by any means ever in the same degree. Palaeontology, or 

 the knowledge of the fossil remains of animals, at first 

 grew but slowly, and it has only been within the last fifty 

 years that it has been brought up into line with the other 

 sciences, as they are understood at the present day, and 

 made its influence most powerfully felt. 



By the middle of the Eighteenth Century great interest 

 was evidenced in travel and exploration, and many 

 countries were being explored by Europeans prompted by 

 a variety of motives. Some went abroad from the sheer 

 love of adventure; some sought wealth and fame; 

 some explored in the interest of science and 

 geography; while others made up the sight- 

 seers. It all tended, however, to produce in 

 the main very good results and was especially favorable 

 to the growth of all the natural sciences. One very im- 



