THE QUINARY SYSTEM. 



xlv 



again he speaks of " the great revolution which the publication 

 of these principles has effected in Zoology."* " He has opened," 

 say Kirby and Spence, " to the philosopher, the moralist, and 

 the divine, that hitherto closed door by which our first parents 

 and their immediate descendants entered the temple of nature, and 

 studied the symbols of knowledge that were there presented to 

 them."f The author himself talks in the same lofty vein. " The 

 nature of the difference," says he, "which exists in natural history, 

 between affinity and analogy, was, I believe, first discovered in 

 studying Lamellicon beetles; and, in the year 1819, when I pub- 

 lished that discovery, &c." " In the year 18174 I detected a 

 quinary arrangement."§ Again, 44 1 cannot indeed be blind to 

 the changes it" [the Horse Entomological] 44 has effected in the 

 English school of Zoology. These are evident on the slightest 

 comparison of the Zoological works published in England previous 

 and subsequent to 1822." || 



I am sorry I cannot join such excellent men and able naturalists 

 as Mr. Kirby and Mr. Vigors, in these high eulogiums on the 

 system of their friend, whose extensive learning and superior 

 talents I am most willing to acknowledge ; but I must confess 

 that the existence of this 4 4 great revolution" is much more novel 

 to me than the alleged discovery, which is by no means new or 

 peculiar in all its bearings, though I am thoroughly convinced, 

 from the statements I have so amply quoted, that it is not only 

 fanciful but pernicious. As to the originality or novelty of the 

 discovery claimed, (though if the system be admitted to be arti- 

 ficial, invention would be the correct term,) it will not be difficult 

 to show that the claim has little, if any, foundation. 44 1 disco- 

 vered" says an able advocate of the system, 44 as I advanced, that 

 the larger or primary groups into which it" [the science of Orni- 

 thology] 44 arranged itself, were connected together by an unin- 

 terrupted chain of affinities ; that this series or chain returned into 

 itself, and that the groups of which it was composed, preserved, 



* Linn. Trans, vol. xiv. p. 398. 

 f Introd. iv., 415. It is not a little singular that Mr. MacLeay himself says 

 that he is here praised for what the authors did not understand. Dying Strug- 

 gle, p. 26. 



X MacLeay, Linn. Trans, vol. xiv. p. 49. §Ih.p. 62. || Dying Struggle, p. 4. 



