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Show Entered according to the act of congress, in the year one thousand eight bun.dre.d and h. b t uty-one, y G• & C . & H · Cal'vill • in the clerk' s office of the southern dtstnct of New York , Philadelphia : Printed by James Kay, Jun. & Co. Printel's to the American Philosophical Society. No. 4, Minor Street. REMARKS. IN presenting to the Zoologist this production of the Aristotle of the nineteenth century, the oracle of his science, it · is far from my intention to occupy his time by attempting to show that it is not only the best source of knowledge to which he can refer, that of Nature herself alone excepted, but that it is the only one from which he can be certain of obtaining it unmingled with the grossest error-for this is universally admitted. Divesting himself of the prejudices arising from a blind reverence for authority and a habit of imitation, our author has brought all the free energies of his powerful and penetrating mind to the investigation of his subject. Perceiving at once the importance of the difference between the constant and mutable characters of animals, aware of the harmony subsisting between one constant character and another, and unappalled by the prospect of the almost endless labour that awaited him, he resolved to expose them with the knife; expecting by the aid of comparative anatomy to arrive at facts which would enable him to arrange the whole animal kingdom, from Man to the last of the Infusoria, in its natural order. How well he has succeeded, the precision with which he has characterized insulated and mutilated fragments of fossil bones of extinct species, and the reconstruction of the whole of their gigantic frames from a part, this book, and the common consent of the learned of all countries, amply testify. He has accomplished the boast of Horace, he has erected the altars of the science in the temple of Truth, and placed its |