AS A NATURALIST 
and expression of the animals represented are rendered, and in 
the vigour and refinement of touch, many of these drawings are 
hardly to be surpassed, and their number is such as to show that 
they must have been executed with ease. Thus, in the first part 
of the first volume there are twenty-four representations of the 
heads of birds, and in the second part of the same volume there 
are no less than one hundred and seventy-two drawings of in- 
sects or of parts of them, and twenty-eight of mollusks and tes- 
tacea. Many of the drawings of the parts of insects are enlarged, 
and they are noted as " microscopio auctum''^ or ^^lente visuviy'' or 
with words to like effect. 
In a letter to his old friend Dr. Wharton, in 1760, not far 
from the time when he was beginning his work on this copy of 
the Sy sterna Naturae^ Gray wrote: "To find one's self business, 
I am persuaded, is the great art of life: . . . some spirit, some- 
thing of genius (more than common) is required to teach a man 
to employ himself.'' The Linnasiis shows that his genius was suf- 
ficient for this task. "Perhaps,'"* said one of his old friends, 
shortly after his death, — "perhaps he was the most learned man 
in Europe. . . . But he was also a good man, a well-bred man, a 
man of virtue and humanity." That remarkable Swiss youth, 
Bonstetten, who by his many gifts and graces won the heart of 
Gray in the year before the poet's death, in a charming letter 
from Cambridge to their common friend, the Reverend Norton 
( 17) 
