322 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY, 
er of her years, dying with the regret of not having been able to 
conaplete for her beloved star the series of canines ! For we can- 
not deceive ourselves on this point; the series of canines is not 
completed : the scale is broken at the note of the fishing-dog, and 
the dog of Newfoundland would in vain flatter himself with filling 
the vacancy. The Newfoundland dog is only a fisher of men, and 
it is a fisher of fish that we want. 
How many naturalists suspect that the same cause which pro- 
duced the last deluge, occasioned the interruption of the canine 
series 
What has betrayed the learned in the affair of classification, is 
pride and want of faith in the wisdom of G-od. The learned man 
has done like the philosopher ; he has deprived passion of its em- 
ployment as the universal guide of classification, as senary guide, 
and God has punished him like the augur Tiresias, with blindness. 
The learned have not understood the simplest thing in the 
world, to wit: iXydi passion disti'ibutes characters. This oversight 
has ruined them. 
When the immortal discoverer of the mastodon — when George 
^ I have connected with all the names of planets feminine pronouns, be- 
cause, though hermaphrodite in their structure according to the hypothet- 
ical cosmogony from which Toussenel has borrowed, they are all feminine 
in their relations with the Sun, pivot of the solar vortex. Their animal, 
vegetable, and mineral creations are, besides, to be distinguished as indus- 
trial operations, and differ widely in their origin from those acts which re- 
sult in the formation of new sidereal beings. 
I intended at first to have suppressed what will seem so extravagant and 
undemonstrable as many parts of the introduction, but it would be de- 
frauding the really appreciative reader too much. What we cannot accept 
as science, we may at least be amused by as fiction. Toussenel’s rich and 
delicate humor abounds here ; and even should all the details prove ulti- 
mately erroneous, our present barren and materialistic methods of sci- 
ence may be no less benefited by the spiritual suggestions of a theory, 
which at least is sound in this that it seeks first everywhere the soul, the 
animating passional principle, the key-note of the being. 
Whether the specialities are true or false, they serve, like the X s and ys 
of algebra, to arrive at the determination of unknown quantities ; and 
there is an internal allegorical meaning concealed in them which will be 
an open secret, and a very charming one for the author’s true group of 
readers. Others will be better satisfied with the chapters on beasts. — T r 
