Cloister and the Hearth, The,
52.
De Vere, Aubrey, Poems by,
54.
Dickens’s Works, Household Edition,
55.
Harris’s Insects Injurious to Vegetation,
55.
John Brent,
54.
Leigh Hunt, Correspondence of,
55.
Lessons in Life,
51.
Mueller’s Lectures on the Science of Language,
51.
Newman’s Homeric Translation in Theory and
in Practice,
51.
Pauli’s Pictures of Old England,
55.
Record of an Obscure Man,
55.
Tragedy of Errors,
55.
Willmott’s English Sacred Poetry,
52.
OBITUARY, 51.
* * * *
*
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A Magazine of literature, art,
and politics.
* * * *
*
Vol. IX.—January, 1862.—No.
LI.
* * * *
*
It is my intention, in this series of papers, to give
the history of the progress in Natural History from
the beginning,—to show how men first approached
Nature,—how the facts of Natural History
have been accumulated, and how those facts have been
converted into science. In so doing, I shall
present the methods employed in Natural History on
a wider scale and with broader generalizations than
if I limited myself to the study as it exists to-day.
The history of humanity, in its efforts to understand
the Creation, resembles the development of any individual
mind engaged in the same direction. It has its
infancy, with the first recognition of surrounding
objects; and, indeed, the early observers seem to
us like children in their first attempts to understand
the world in which they live. But these efforts,
that appear childish to us now, were the first steps
in that field of knowledge which is so extensive that
all our progress seems only to show us how much is
left to do.
Aristotle is the representative of the learning of
antiquity in Natural Science. The great mind
of Greece in his day, and a leader in all the intellectual
culture of his time, he was especially a naturalist,
and his work on Natural History is a record not only
of his own investigations, but of all preceding study
in this department. It is evident that even then
much had been done, and, in allusion to certain peculiarities
of the human frame, which he does not describe in
full, he refers his readers to familiar works, saying,
that illustrations in point may be found in anatomical
text-books.[1]
