% 
PREFACE. 
—o—- 
A NEW edition of this work having been called for, I 
was requested to revise it and see it through the press. 
The attempt to render scientific subjects popular and 
attractive to the general reader has always appeared to me 
a most laudable one. It has always received the support of 
our most original workers and deepest thinkers; and yet, so 
far as the English language is concerned, the attempt to make 
zoological science familiar to the ordinary reader has, in my 
opinion, most generally been a failure. Such essays as the 
“Studies of Animal Life,” by G. H. Lewes, were indeed full 
of ‘promise ; but such served scarcely more than to introduce 
the reader to the very threshold of the science, though they 
at the same time showed what thoroughly good work could 
be done in this direction by our British scientific men. 
In the meanwhile, a series of most attractive works on 
biological science, and beautifully illustrated, was being pub- 
lished in France, some written or edited by names well 
known in the fields of scientific research, others—as those by 
M. Figuier—by men eloquent after the fashion of their 
countrymen, but much wanting in that exact knowledge of 
the sciences about which they wrote, and which would 
have enabled them to avoid falling into many and grievous 
errors. 
