NATURAL HISTORY. 6 



degrees. Men, then, hardly considering what they did know, because 

 perhaps they knew but little in proportion to what they saw, the 

 transition from one improvement to another was gradual ; whereby 

 they almost lost sight of the past by its having become familiar to 

 them; and they had not the means nor the disposition to record it 

 farther than by narration, which is called ' Tradition.' 



As cultivation makes considerable changes and improvements in 

 natural things, and as, from the above reasons, we are in a great 

 degree ignorant both of those improvements and their cause, it becomes 

 difficult to know what these improvements are and to account for the 

 causes of many appearances now existing, or to know with any degree 

 of eertainty what [natural things] were original and what are still 

 original, viz. what has not undergone any change from cultivation and 

 what has. For it is evident by classing nature, and so by bringing 

 things into their ultimate class, viz. species, that there is in a great 

 number of species a considerable variety in the same : and, from this 

 variety in the same species, it becomes a doubt whether they were all 

 original, or whether any one of them are original, or none of them ; or, 

 if any one be original, which that one is. 



But those improvements, &c. in natural productions can only take 

 place in vegetable and animal matter, those being the only matter that 

 has the power of reproducing itself. For the common mass of earth 

 appears to have no power of reproduction, therefore no permanent 

 principle of variation : for, when parts of the mass do vary, it is from 

 some immediate cause as a mixture of different substances, &c, which 

 terminates with itself and therefore may be called accidental. 



If the study of Natural History had been coeval with its own ad- 

 vancement, and had that advancement been communicated to the world, 

 as it arose, for the improvement of mankind 1 , we should not now be at 

 a loss to account for many appearances that owe their birth to changes 

 that have taken place in the productions of Nature by Time, of which 

 we are at present ignorant. But, as the advancement in knowledge 

 had gone considerable lengths before the certain means of communi- 

 cating it was known, as also what may be called a permanent mode of 

 communication, — and as, where those means were known yet a dis- 

 position [to use them] was wanting, [there being] besides, a degree of 

 superstition and a bias for the marvellous, which is always introduced 

 with ignorance, — it is no wonder we are left in the ignorant state we 

 are in at present. 



1 [If the study of Nature had been coeval with the changes in Nature, and those 

 changes had been recorded as they arose, &e.] 



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