vi » PLAN OF THE WORK. 
rapid progress recently made in other branches of know- 
ledge, naturalists having obviously acquired an artifi- 
cial taste for the smoke. The chief glory of our modern 
naturalists appears to be the discovery of species, which, 
to use their cant phrases, may be “new to science,” oy 
“an addition to the British Fauna,”’—the term Fauna 
being generally and most inaccurately applied to fishes, 
shells, and other productions, of a certainty not under 
the dominion of the goddess of the woods and fields; no 
more than mushrooms and sea-weeds, which have no 
flower, are under the dominion of Flora. The term 
Kingdom, in the phrase animal, vegetable, and mineral 
kingdom, together with Tribes, Families, and the like, is 
founded on quaint and inaccurate fancies of the same 
kind, which would not be tolerated in any other branch 
of science or literature. 
In deseribing species, either well known or “ new to 
ow Fauna,” or “our Flora, the current style, mis- 
named scientific, may be fairly characterised as a 
uniform tissue of pedantic barbarisms, devised, it 
would appear, not for the diffusion, but the conceal- 
ment of knowledge. If the descriptions affect to be in 
English, the language employed is most assuredly not 
English. Thus we have “flavous” and “Juteous” for 
“yellow,” “ griseous” for grey, “fuscous” for dusky ;”” 
while similar words are not only compounded with Latin 
derivatives, as “« Ochraceous-fuscous,” meaning, I con- 
jecture, “ dusky-buff,” but with plain English, such as 
