REVIEWS. 
95 
sea-girt isles of ours, and showing us the folly of sighing for other worlds 
to conquer. 
And its natural history is not confined to the few and to the learned, 
but is daily becoming the study of the many, and they are beginning— 
it may be by slow degrees, but yet surely—to find it sweet to look round 
them, and behold the things which a bountiful Creator has strewed in 
living perfection about them, and of which, when he had made them, he 
pronounced to be very good; and when man takes an interest in any of 
God’s creation, he delights to place upon it some token by which he may 
talk of it to others ; and hence he gives to it a name. It was early in 
the world’s history, while man reigned by himself in Paradise, that the 
beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and every living creature, appeared 
in one long array before him, and Adam gave to them all a name. Would 
that that nomenclature was still extant, and then we should be able to 
know and to recognise all creation, and be freed from the Babel that 
modern men’s devices have raised. 
And now let us suppose that an inquirer, one who wishes to know somewhat 
of the animated nature of this our native land, should apply to us to know 
how he was to discover what names had been attached to the objects of his 
search, we would direct him to the many and costly monographs that have 
from time to time made their appearance, and tell him he would get the 
information he needed in some one of them. Oh! but, he might say, I 
want some single volume that may contain, in a condensed form, all the 
instruction that I need. Surely, if Linnaeus wrote a Systema Naturae 
meant for the whole world, some of our many naturalists have done the 
same kind office for this much smaller world of ours; and until but very 
recently we should, albeit reluctantly, have answered him in the negative, 
and told him to wait for some better time. 
But now we can introduce to the notice of such inquirers as these the 
book which stands at the head of our notice. Previously we told them 
of monographs, whose very perfection put them far beyond their reach; 
now we can tell them of a manual whose chief perfection is, that it will be 
within the reach of all, that the tyro, or even the more advanced student, 
may, with the greatest ease, carry in his pocket, and refer to as he sits 
upon the weed-fringed rock, or stands upon the tide-washed shore. 
This manual of British Marine Zoology is the production of a naturalist 
well-known to our readers, whether they think of him as the sojourner 
in the Bluefields of Jamaica, under the shade of the calabash trees, or by 
the sea-coast and the rock-pools of sunny Devonshire. View him as we 
may, we still see the genuine naturalist, one who woos Nature in her own 
