FRANCIS WILLUGHBY. 
27 
useful by the greatest masters of the science, 
cannot but be looked upon as truly wonderful.” 
In the history of Solomon, who flourished 
about a thousand years before Christ, we meet 
with the next most ancient recognition of the 
study of Natural History. In the account given 
of that monarch’s attainments, in the first Book 
of Kings, 4th chapter and 33d verse, it is stated, 
that “ he spake of trees, from the cedar that is on 
Lebanon, even unto the hyssop, (or moss,* rather, 
the first trace of vegetable germination,) that 
springeth out of the wall ; he spake also of beasts, 
and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of 
fishes — in which account it is worthy of remark, 
that, with the addition of trees, the same distri- 
bution is adopted, and in the same order as that 
which occurs in the words stated to have been 
spoken of God to Noah thirteen centuries be- 
fore. 
Though it is impossible to say, amid the 
absence of all means of judging, except isolated 
assertions like these, what were ‘the real attain- 
ments of Solomon in Natural History; it will 
not be thought a hazardous conjecture, that they, 
at least, included a correct acquaintance with 
that system, as far as it extends, which is involved 
in the. Levitical ritual. How far his mind, highly 
gifted by nature, and endowed with superhuman 
sagacity, might have rendered that system the 
nucleus of more extended inquiries, aided as he 
Hasselquist. 
