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METHODS OF STUDY IN NATURAL HISTORY.


I.

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,