54 Bibliographical Notices. 



sorting to any illiberal depreciation of the equally valuable labours 

 of others. And indeed, without the assistance of these despised closet- 

 naturalists, what would the works of Mr. Gosse and other field-natu- 

 ralists become ? — a mere chaos ! a mass of inextricable confusion ! 

 Mr. Gosse may rest assured, that other and far higher powers than 

 those of the mere observer are required by those who endeavour to 

 bring the disjointed materials furnished by field-naturalists and spe- 

 cies-describers into something like order, — to make them subservient 

 to the progress of science towards its true object, the development of 

 our knowledge of the system of nature. " This is natural history." 



Man and his Migrations. By R. G. Latham, M.D., F.R.S. &c. 

 Van Voorst, 1851, fc. 8vo, pp. 250. 



The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies. By 

 R. G. Latham, Esq., M.D. &c. London: Van Voorst, 1851, 

 fc. 8vo, pp. 264. 



Few things testify more strongly to the contracted views and the 

 want of philosophic insight, which result from the systems of edu- 

 cation generally adopted in this country, than the excessive estimation 

 of ' practical' science, as it is termed, in contradistinction to that 

 form of inquiry which is content to go forward in the simple hope of 

 discovering truth, with the purpose of bringing the laws regulating 

 all cosmical phsenomena into the domain of human knowledge. 

 That short-sightedness which approves only of the pursuit of trains 

 of investigation likely to result speedily in the acquisition of means 

 of increasing material wealth, may be pardoned in the uneducated, 

 whose sole conceptions of science are derived from the vague im- 

 pressions made upon their minds by the astonishing applications of 

 abstract theory now so abundantly met with in all civilized com- 

 munities ; but to those who have the opportunity of knowing the 

 history of human progress in any one department, it cannot be par- 

 doned that they should shut their eyes to the universal fact of 

 'practical' value being a quality which science can only exhibit in 

 an advanced stage of its cultivation ; and further, it may be assumed 

 that they have but a very imperfect idea of the nature and object of 

 human endowments, who do not recognize that that power of culti- 

 vating intellect necessarily involves a corresponding amount of duty. 



The most satisfactory signs of a more liberal tone, of a more com- 

 prehensive spirit in the exercise of thought, are furnished by the 

 growing interest among educated persons generally in those depart- 

 ments of knowledge which are conversant with the progressive 

 changes of the earth and its inhabitants. And it would seem as 

 though physical science, not content with its own wonderful deve- 

 lopment, had pressed over into the domain of moral science, disturbing 

 history in its endless coiling inward upon itself, and was striving to 

 wrest from it facts which were once its undisputed property, to build 

 a new science of progress upon them. It is however the 'method' 

 which leads us to this fancy ; the real case is that a new science has 

 grown up, in which physical science and history go hand in hand in 



