18 THE YOUNG NATURALIST. 



and often entirely erroneous observations and assumptions. Professor 

 Agassiz says of him, " His work shows a total absence of systematic 

 form or any classification or framework to express the division of the 

 animal kingdom into larger or lesser groups." And the learned 

 Whewell writes, " He never had a system proper ; although he saw 

 the necessity of one, he failed to indicate it." But Aristotle's claims 

 are still considerable. He was the first to understand and express 

 the principle of homologues and homologous growths, that is that 

 principle by which we assert that the wing sheaths of a beetle or the 

 balancers of a Tipula are to be considered really as wings, although 

 they bear no external objective resemblance to those organs, but only 

 a subjective mental one. His remarks, too, on correlated growths 

 are acute and interesting ; in fact Aristotle, although no systematist, 

 was undoubtedly a naturalist in the best sense of the word, the first 

 and only one so far as we know of the classic world, and it was in 

 this character that for long centuries after his death he was revered 

 by scholars and thinkers as little less than divine. And in that 

 ancient world he had no peer. Pliny cannot be considered as more 

 than a collector and recorder of unorganized fragments of knowledge ; 

 and after the fall of the Empire we fail to catch one ray of any new 

 light through all the ages — well called dark. The culture which the 

 classic nations bequeathed to Europe was purely human, and the 

 sphere of nature was regarded during the first fifteen centuries of the 

 Christian era as subject to no laws capable of investigation, and in- 

 volved in a mystery which it was impious as well as useless for the 

 mind of man to attempt to fathom. The Church, all powerful in its 

 empire over the mind, carefully discouraged and repressed all ten- 

 dency to scientific inquiry. But with the Renaissance, the minds 

 of men released from the fetters of ages, expanded vigorously into new 

 channels in the pursuit of truth. Nature assumed a new guise, and 

 nothing in the heavens above or in the earth beneath, appeared too 

 great or too small for the penetrating reach of human intellect. We 

 find a Swiss, one Conrad Gesner, born in 15 16, the first child of the 

 new age who turned his attention to the study of nature. An in- 

 defatiguable writer and observer, he published several extensive works 

 on the Vertebrata in his own lifetime. The result of his studies of 

 the Articulata saw the light many years after his decease, in the work 

 of the English MoufFet, published in 1634, about a century after their 

 origin ; but we can hardly class either MoufFet, or any other writer of 

 17th century, that is before Ray, as in a strict sense a systematist. 

 The study of entomology was in its infancy, and naturally required 



