XVI INTRODUCTION TO THE FIBST EDITION. 



Historia Animalium of Aristotle to that of St. Pierre and 

 Faujas St. Fond.* 



Before Eome existed, and before the Iliad was composed, 

 Egypt had its Pyramids and its Thebes ; that land of prac- 

 tical science, bordered on regions of the earth surpassed by 

 none for variety in the forms of animal life. I allude to 

 Africa within the tropics. Nearly every animal susceptible 

 of domestication and useful to man had been appropriated by 

 the Coptic race of Egypt and Nubia ; whilst all the tcilde of 

 nature had in succession been exhibited to the nation in 

 various triumphal processions. But all this was merely prac- 

 tical and transitory. It was the same with Rome, Eastern 

 and Western; no science resulted from it, no zoological 

 science, at least ; and the dawn of civilization which re-opened 

 in Europe after the dreadful period of the Dark and 'Middle 

 Ages, found zoological and natural science precisely where it 

 was left by Pliny a tissue of puerilities, of vague hypotheses, 

 of silly fancies, upon which no critique had ever been exercised. 



Notwithstanding the occasional appearance of able men, it 

 continued in this sad state until the close of the seventeenth 

 century. Neither zoology nor mineralogy nor geology had 

 any real existence. 



In 1707, or about that period, two men appeared, simulta- 

 neously, destined to rescue Zoology at last from the degraded 

 state to which Pliny and his imitators, abounding most in 

 England, had reduced it. These were Carl Linne and the 

 Count de Buffon. To these truly great men we owe the 

 first attempt to remove the natural sciences from the control 

 of those into whose hands they had fallen. The genius of 

 Linne led to classification, that of Buffon to description ; the 

 one defined, the other described. But the genius of the latter 

 was of a higher cast : it anticipated the future ; and men now 

 read with surprise and learn with astonishment (a surprise 

 and astonishment in which I do not partake) that Buffon 

 was no mere compiler, no mere literary man, no mere writer 



* See Great Artists and Great Anatomists. London : Van Voorst. 



