ADVERTISEMENT. 



than to any preliminary observations he can ofFer : he shall only presume 

 respectfully that they are adequate to the purpose, and calculated to 

 answer every moderate expectation his preliminary observations may 

 have excited. 



It will be readily conceived that the opportunities of the author's life, 

 so assiduously devoted to the Science of Nature, must have enabled him 

 to enrich his port ftuilles with a collection of Drawings, Manuscripts, 

 and Memoranda of no mean importance in all its branches. This is 

 perfectly correct. His own Museum confined chiefly, but not exclusively, 

 to the productions of Great Britain, have afforded many rarities, the 

 offspring of foreign climates, which could not elsewhere be procured. But 

 independently of those resources which his own collection has afforded, 

 his other means have been amply extensive. Through the kindness of 

 his scientific friends, he has had unlimitted access to many other collec- 

 tions of acknowledged moment, for the purpose of enriching his Collectanea 

 with drawings and descriptions of the more interesting rarities which those 

 cabinets respectively contained. Some of those collections exist no longer 

 and are probably now forgotten, but the memory of others, even among 

 the number of those which have passed away, will ever be cherished with 

 regret in the mind of every man of science by whom their merits were 

 understood. The preservation even of the memorials of some minor 

 portion of the rarities which those collections once embodied can scarcely 

 fail to prove of interest at the present day, while their total loss to the 

 rising generation will be in some degree appreciated from the memoranda 

 and occasional references that will appear respecting them in the progress 

 of the present work: to enumerate the many collections of private indi- 

 viduals, the rarities of which have contributed to render this collection of 

 the author's drawings important, would extend our advertisement far 

 beyond our intended limits. It may be sufficient to observe that the late 

 Leverian Museum, rich in every branch of Natural History, has tended 

 in an eminent degree to this effect ; the author having been favoured with 

 unreserved permission to take drawings and memoranda of whatever 

 he deemed important, besides having subsequently enriched his own 

 Museum with a very ample portion of that fine collection, by public 

 purchase, at the time of its dispersion ; particularly in the different tribes 

 of the Mammiferous animals, in Ornithology, Ichthyology, and various 

 others ; and also with every object materially important among the extra- 

 neous fossils which that splendid museum originally contained. It will be 



