PREFACE. 
IX 
assistance rendered to the present volume by those friends who 
have acted either as editors or revisers. If the result meet with 
approval, to them be the honour ; if otherwise, I am prepared to 
share the blame, for nothing whatever has been arranged without 
my concurrence, or written that has not passed under my revision. 
But in truth the book has to me associations more grave than any 
connected merely with literary praise or censure. It speaks to 
me of four lamented friends, Thompson, Eorbes, # Johnston,! and 
Garrett ; J they laboured in very different spheres, yet were all 
actuated by the same object, 
“ to know 
The works of God, thereby to glorify 
The great Workmaster.” 
In little more than three years they passed away. They were 
endeared to me by personal intimacy or unreserved correspond- 
ence. Their labours are connected in different ways with the 
present volume, and in it their names are of frequent occurrence* 
What winder then that a voice of solemn admonition comes to 
me from its pages, and breathes into my ear the words of the 
Psalmist, “ The days of man are but as grass, for he flourisheth as 
a flower of the field ; for as soon as the wind goeth over it, it is 
gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more ! ” 
BOBEBT PATTEBSON. 
Belfast, 20 th March, 1856. 
* Professor Edward Forbes died at Edinburgh, 18th Nov., 1854. A sketch of 
his life and labours, from the pen of his friend and colleague, Professor Balfour, 
is given in the Annals of Natural History for January, 1855. It concludes most 
appropriately by quoting the statements made regarding him by four men of 
eminence, viz., an anatomist, a botanist, a geologist, and a zoologist, who well 
knew his merits. 
f Dr. George Johnston died at Berwick-on-Tweed, 30th July, 1855, a town 
to which his labours have given a scientific celebrity. An enumeration of his 
principal writings appeared in the Athenaeum and in the Literary Gazette on the 
ensuing Saturday (Aug. 4), and a Biographical Sketch in the Edinburgh Medi- 
cal Journal of September, 1855. 
f Mr. James R. Garrett died of fever on the 2nd of April, 1855, in the thirty- 
eighth year of his age. In the Dublin Natural History Review for July, 1855, 
there appeared a notice of the event, in which justice is done to his attainments 
as a naturalist, his “ unassuming manners, kindly disposition, and simple yet 
refined tastes.” 
