PREFACE. ix 



nights. Buffon himself, to whom such catalogues owe their chief reputation, was 

 more properly the historian of a few natural objects, than the " Historian of Nature." 

 This, perhaps, to the generality of readers, will appear a bold assertion, when directed 

 against a man so celebrated ; and may indeed startle any person who has been accus- 

 tomed to allow the following parallel to be correctly drawn. " Linnaeus saisissoit avec 

 finesse les traits distinctifs des itres ; Buffon embrassoit d'un coup d'aeil les rapports les 

 plus eloignes." But I confess that the truth of this distinction, so indisputable in the 

 eyes of French naturalists, has never yet been apparent to me ; and so far from attri- 

 buting general views of the plan of creation to Buffon, in preference to Linnaeus, I 

 do not conceive that the mode in which he studied Natural History, could ever have 

 led him beyond a well-written " Animal Biography." It is not indeed asserted, that 

 Buffon was destitute of general notions on the creation ; for this with a man of 

 genius, looking at so divine a work, was impossible : still less is it asserted that he 

 was deficient in the powers of generalizing ; but what I mean is, that his ideas of 

 nature were from the foundation wrong, his mode of studying her works errone- 

 ous, -and his general conclusions, therefore, almost always false. For the truth of 

 my position, I have only to refer to those parts of his works that touch on what 

 is truly the science of Natural History : as for instance, to take one of the most 

 profound of them, his account of birds that have not the power of flying. All 

 that can be said in favour of the above distinction, is, that if Buffon had an 

 eye for seizing any relations of affinity, they were indeed " les plus eloignes." 

 Leaving, therefore, such a plan as his to those inventive imaginations, those crude 

 theories, and that pompous flowery style, which can alone give it any peculiar interest, 

 the modern writers of Faunae or Flora?, have invariably been obliged to resort to 

 systematic descriptive catalogues. All of these however may, I conceive, be reduced 

 to two kinds — those which are founded on artificial systems, and those which are 

 grounded, not on any particular artificial system, but on the endeavour to disco- 

 ver the natural system. Of the first kind, that is, of those which are drawn up 

 according to the pre-conceived importance of some one or two particular organs, 

 is the justly celebrated Sy sterna Natural of Linnaeus. 



We have seen that by such a plan as that of Buffon, it would be impossible to 

 make known the forms of every insect, shell, or moss, that may occur in distant coun- 

 tries, and recourse is therefore had to a systematic catalogue wmch, by referring to the 

 arrangement of some classical work, such as the " Sy sterna Naturae," or the " Regne 

 Animal," enables the traveller at once to give a name to the object he describes, and 

 the reader to know it by that name. The advantage of such a descriptive catalogue 

 is, that to scientific characters and technical descriptions, written with the precision 

 of Linnaeus, may thus be subjoined the histories of the rarest animals, written with the 



eloquence 



