136 HISTORY OF 



couched in a methodical form, quickly directs 

 me to what I seek for. Thus we will suppose 

 that our inquirer has met with a spider, and that 

 he has never seen such an insect before. He is 

 taught by the writer of a system* to examine 

 whether it has wings, and he finds that it has 

 none ; he therefore is to look for it among the 

 wingless insects, or the Aptera, as Linnaeus calls 

 them : he then is to see whether the head and 

 breast make one part of the body, or are disunit- 

 ed ; he finds they make one : he is then to reckon 

 the number of feet and eyes ; and he finds that it 

 has eight of each. The insect, therefore, must 

 be either a scorpion or a spider ; but he lastly 

 examines its feelers, which he finds clavated or 

 clubbed : and by all these marks he at last dis- 

 covers it to be a spider. Of spiders there are 

 above forty sorts ; and by reading the description 

 of each, the inquirer will learn the name of that 

 which he desires to know. With the name of the 

 insect, he is also directed to those authors that 

 have given any account of it, and the page where 

 that account is to be found ; by this means he 

 may know at once what has been said of that ani- 

 mal by others, and what there is of novelty in the 

 result of his own researches. 



From hence it will appear how useful those sys- 

 tems in natural history are to the inquirer ; but 

 having given them all their merit, it would be 

 wrong not to observe, that they have in general 

 been very much abused. Their authors, in gene- 



* Linnaeus. 



