PREFACE. 



Natural History is far too much a science of dead 

 things ; a necrology. It is mainly conversant with 

 dry skins furred or feathered, blackened, shrivelled, 

 and hay-stuffed ; with objects, some admirably beau- 

 tiful, some hideously ugly, impaled on pins, and 

 arranged in rows in cork drawers ; with uncouth 

 forms, disgusting to sight and smell, bleached and 

 shrunken, suspended by threads and immersed in 

 spirit (in defiance of the aphorism, that *' he who is 

 born to be hanged will never be drowned") in glass 

 bottles. These distorted things are described ; their 

 scales, plates, feathers counted ; their forms copied, all 

 shrivelled and stiffened as they are ; their colours, 

 changed and modified by death or partial decay, 

 carefully set down ; their limbs, members, and organs 

 measured, and the results recorded in thousandths of 

 an inch ; two names are given to every one ; the 

 whole is enveloped in a mystic cloud of Grseco- 

 Latino-English phraseology (often barbaric enough); 

 — and this is Natural History ! 



Of the hundred thousand animals which are con- 



