364) PRACTICAL AND SCIENTIFIC ZOOLOGY. 



gation I should recommend you to pursue. It is true that, 

 knowing the bird we have been speaking about was a 

 titmouse, you might have saved yourself aU this trouble, 

 and have turned at once to the page of the book wherein 

 you thought it might be described. This mode of pro- 

 ceeding will be all very well, when you are so far ad- 

 vanced as to know by heart the chief divisions ; but 

 if you begin in this way, your reason and observation 

 ■will not be called into exercise; you will overlook 

 things apparently trivial, but upon which a great deal 

 depends. You will, in fact, learn your lesson like a 

 parrot, without being able to assign reason^ when your 

 book is taken from you. 



(450.) Here, then, is an example of the mode in 

 which you should proceed, not only in ornithology, but 

 in every other branch. It is quite useless to multiply 

 instances in entomology, conchology, or any of the 

 other departments. The names only would differ, the 

 principles would be precisely the same. Besides, if you 

 wish to follow my plan of study, you must wait until 

 the volumes, to which I must inevitably refer you, are 

 published. If you are impatient, you may, however, 

 in the mean time, pursue this plan with Linnaeus, Tem- 

 minck, or on any other of the artificial systems ; although 

 there is great fear that, as my scholar, having to unlearn 

 a good deal of what you will there learn, your ideas at 

 first will become confused, and you wiU be less pre- 

 pared to receive instruction in the system you ultimately 

 intend to follow, than if you kept your mind free from 

 different impressions. Be this, however, as it may, the 

 plan of study I have chalked out is equally applicable 

 to any system, no matter who is the expositor ; and I 

 shall end with this advice, — Follow that arrangement 

 ■which is most agreeable to what you see in nature, and 

 most conducive to exhibit the infinite beauty of that 

 system, whatever it be, which must belong to the har- 

 monious plan of an Omnipotent Creator. 



