VI 
IN TUO DUCT I ON. 
honours, have not hesitated to join in the cry, and to depreciate the merits of those 
views upon which, modified and improved by their own enlarged opportunities, 
they endeavour to raise an independent and personal claim to originality. 
It matters little to the true interests of science, although it may be of some 
consequence to our own convenience, whether a certain assemblage of species 
be termed a Subgenus or a Genus, a Family or an Order; whether we restrict 
the appellations of groups to the terms Kingdom, Class, Order and Genus, ad¬ 
mitting intermediate anonymous sections or divisions, or whether we introduce 
such terms as Subkingdom, Family, Tribe, Cohort, Subgenus, and the rest of the 
thousand and one names which have sometimes aided, and perhaps as often 
burthened the mind of the student. To appreciate duly the advantages which 
Natural History has derived from the labours of the learned Swede, we should 
consider not only the state of the science when he undertook the Herculean 
task of reducing it to order, but the immense range of objects to which he 
endeavoured to apply his newly discovered views. It is perhaps no unfair test 
of a writer’s claim to individual merit, to measure that claim by the meed of 
credit which he himself awards to the real deserts of others. Were this rule 
to be fairly applied, how many of the popular authors of the present day 
would sink into nothingness when compared with those great and original 
minds which they affect to contemn, but to which they ignorantly owe perhaps 
all that is really meritorious in their own vaunted productions. It is fair to 
avail ourselves honestly and openly of all the advantages to be obtained from 
the labours of our predecessors; but it is unfair, it is degradingto the science 
we profess, when, by a fraud, not often punishable by human laws, hut not the 
less contrary to sound faith and honour, we desecrate, as it were, the sublime 
and holy object of our devotion, the grandeur and purity of which might well 
shame us from conduct so disgraceful, and excite in us feelings elevated far 
above such mean and unworthy considerations. 
The confusion in which Linnaeus left the Testudinata was but little im¬ 
proved by his successor Gmelin, who, though he considerably augmented the 
number of names, added but little to our real information as to the characters 
of the species. An attempt was made by Schneider * to embody, in a descrip- 
* Allgcmeinc Naturgeschichte der Schildkroten; von Johan Gottlob Schneider, 1783. 
