THE USE OF SYSTEM. 



xix 



Let a system however be as complex and fantastic as it may, 

 it can be employed so as not to impede very much the progress 

 of useful study, provided always that it be regarded in its true 

 light as a cabinet, and not as the sole object and end of science. 

 Did the British Museum, or any other collection of specimens, 

 contain only a series of drawers ticketted with names, but empty 

 and barren, there are probably few who would take the trouble 

 of looking at them; and fewer still who would lumber their 

 memory with these ticket names. Were the fact indeed not noto- 

 rious it would scarcely be credited, that among those who devote 

 their time to the objects of nature, few — very few, ever advance 

 a step beyond this ticket knowledge, or ever dream that it is 

 necessary to go farther. The alphabet of their system is all they 

 study, yet they scruple not to call themselves naturalists, and the 

 alphabet of their system, Natural History ; though they might with 

 equal propriety call the twenty-four letters on a horn book the 

 History of England, and rank the village schoolmaster who teaches 

 it with Hume or Lingard. That some minds may be so consti- 

 tuted as to take pleasure in such nick-nack study, is proved by the 

 analogous pursuits of the collectors of old coins and medals, not 

 for their utility, but solely on account of their rarity, or to perfect 

 a series ; yet it would be as preposterous to rank such mere collec- 

 tors with a man like Niebuhr, who investigated medallic inscrip- 

 tions in order to elucidate the history of Rome, as it would be to 

 rank a mere systematist with Aristotle, Ray, or John Hunter, — 

 three of the greatest names in philosophic natural history. 



" To know the names of things without the things themselves," 

 says Sir William Cornwallis, in his quaint and curious Essayes, "is 

 as unprofitable as a power to repeat the alphabet by a fellow 

 altogether illiterate. Such are the ejecta of a pedant, which to 

 make saleable, he imitated the dyer, whose vat working ill, he 

 makes amends by giving the ill colours new names : so this pedant 

 venting his infinity of words and fortifying them with methodical 

 divisions. But the slippery glibnesse of the tongue giveth such a 

 facility to speake, as commonly it runnes without reason and so is 

 as fruitlesse as a messenger without an errande." * 



I can well foresee that these views will be ill relished by those 



* Essayes, No. 45. 12mo, London, 1631. 

 b 2 



