﻿PROGRESS OF ORNITHOLOGICAL SCIENCE. 193 « 



sary to view it in two positions ; first, in regard to the 

 principles upon which it is prosecuted, and secondly, 

 how far these principles have been applied to practical 

 use, or in other words, to the clear determination of the 

 species. The first of these views contemplates ornitho. 

 logy as an inductive science, and its rank in the scale of 

 human knowledge will be determined by the greater or 

 lesser accordance of its fundamental principles with those 

 which regulate every other branch of the physical sciences, 

 — by the simplification and reduction of its innumera- 

 ble facts to a few universal laws — and by the analogy 

 which can be traced between these laws, and such others 

 that have been determined in higher and more extended 

 portions of creation. For although the study of this 

 branch of zoology is so vast, compared to our limited 

 faculties, that an ordinary life would hardly be sufficient 

 for thoroughly understanding it, yet it is but a very 

 small point in the circle of the physical sciences, which 

 embraces all matter and all creation. When, there- 

 fore, we have advanced in the philosophy of any branch 

 of natural history, so far as to assimilate its laws 

 with others that have been determined in conterminous 

 branches, we have demonstrative evidence that our as- 

 sumptions are correct; but if two or three of these laws 

 can be still farther traced throughout the visible creation, 

 and even to extend themselves to all that is known of 

 the spiritual world, our evidence is of a much higher 

 cast. The truths of the one, become not only connected, 

 but, as it were, amalgmated, with the truths of the other; 

 they cannot, in minds accustomed to inductive reasoning, 

 be separated ; and we become as much inclined to ques- 

 tion the circular progress of the planets round the sun, 

 as the circular development of the variation of forms in 

 the animal and the vegetable creation. 



(166.) Ornithology, no less than other branches of 

 zoology, is rapidly approaching, in its fundamental prin- 

 ciples, to the state of demonstrative certainty just inti- 

 mated. Enough has been already published to show 

 that the principles upon which it is now founded, as a 

 



