Natural History of the Animal Kingdom, Being a Systematic and Popular Description of the Habits, Structure, and Classification of Animals from the Hig (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1859 edition. Excerpt: ...g a systematic arrangement, or in other words, a scientific classification.-rill to present the subject in a form so simple, and so far divested of technicalities, that any person of common education may read it, understand it, and profit by it. The ultimate objeel of Natural 1 Bstory is not to furnish an array of hard names in the form of a complicated classification: these, so dear, so significant t the scientific student, are only the means and instruments by which certain practical results are to be attained. They are the skeleton: the blood, the flesh, the palpitating life, consist in what is perfectly appreciable by common mindsthe wonderful structure, the beautiful adaptations, the amazing instincts, the admirable powers, the interesting qualities, the prodigious diversities of form, to be traced in the Animal Kingdom. These are revelations which expand the mind, elevate the heart, and inevitably lead the student of nature up to natures God. These are the beneficent fruits of science; they are the practical results of the profound and toilsome researches of scientific men; and yet, but for some such work as this now presented to the public, they must remain beyond the reach of the million, locked up in quartos, hidden in the libraries of the learned, or at best, seen darkly and confusedly in the dizzying mist of long Greek and Latin names. My task, in comparison with that of those who explore and discover scientific facts, and even of those who merely assign them to their places in the gallery of science, is a humble one. and yet it seems to me necessary to be accomplished, in order to make the world at large participators in the golden fruit of scientific research. I regard myself as a simple interpreter of the language of the...