PREFACE. 
Natural History is far too much a science of dead 
things; a necrology. It is mainly conversant with 
dry skins furred or feathered, blackened, shrivelled, 
and hay-stuffed ; with objects, some admirably beau- 
tiful, some hideously ugly, impaled on pins, and 
arranged in rows in cork drawers ; with uncouth 
forms, disgusting to sight and smell, bleached and 
shrunken, suspended by threads and immersed in 
spirit (in defiance of the aphorism, that he who is 
born to he hanged will never be drowned”) in glass 
bottles. These distorted things are described ; their 
scales, plates, feathers counted ; their forms copied, all 
shrivelled and stiffened as they are ; their colours, 
changed and modified by death or partial decay, 
carefully set down ; their limbs, members, and organs 
measured, and the results recorded in thousandths of 
an inch ; two names are given to every one ; the 
whole is enveloped in a mystic cloud of Graeco- 
Latino-English phraseology (often barbaric enough); 
— and this is Natural History ! 
Of the hundred thousand animals which are con- 
