1 944 Classified Hon . 



almost exclusively of the record of facts ; but such is, and must be, 

 the groundwork of all those branches of study that lead us to a 

 knowledge of the laws by which the material world is, and has been, 

 regulated, from a beginning which we cannot yet conceive. 



Our mental existence is so closely dependant on our physical sensi- 

 bilities, that it is only through the special contrivances which the body 

 affords that we can possibly become acquainted with the nature and 

 properties of things around us ; the effects made apparent to our senses 

 must then, it is obvious, be the source from which all ideas proceed, 

 and it is in them alone that we can expect to find that alphabet, in 

 which, by the exercise of our intellectual powers, we read the causes, 

 from the most immediate to the most remote, and deduce, from the 

 earliest periods of which we can obtain a knowledge, the course of 

 operations whereby the present state of what we see is brought 

 about. 



Perhaps it is our duty still further to admit, that, in this progress 

 from facts to generalizations and laws, Natural History is far from 

 being foremost among the sciences : the objects of which it treats are 

 so numerous, and the circumstances respecting each are so many, that 

 long must be the series of observations, and great must be the labour 

 and judgment bestowed in their arrangement, before any satisfactory 

 conclusions can be reached. And it is but in times comparatively 

 modern that this branch of knowledge can be said to have risen to 

 sufficient rank to be looked upon as a science at all : its cultivators 

 among the ancients were few ; the facts they collected were loose, and 

 often mixed with fable ; the general contempt in which the observa- 

 tion of Nature was at that time esteemed retarded its steps, so that 

 no generalizations could be effected. As knowledge, however, began 

 to increase, it was found that Nature could only be rightly understood 

 by careful and unwearied observation of effects, that the inductive 

 process must precede the deductive, and, therefore, it was necessary 

 to descend awhile from those heights of purely abstract science, which 

 the pride of the ancient schools considered as alone worthy to be at- 

 tained by man. Facts then began to accumulate, and the examination 

 of Nature's forms showed them so abundant and so various that it 

 defied the power of unassisted memory to retain them ; a sufficient 

 number of names could not be found to designate them ; and the want 

 of terms extensive, and at the same time sufficiently definite, in their 

 application, rendered the enunciation of general propositions difficult. 

 It is not surprising that the different degrees of resemblance exist- 

 ing among the forms of organized beings were then made use of, to 



