The purport of the following pages is an endeavour to reduce the facts
belonging to ANIMAL LIFE into classes, orders, genera, and species; and, by
comparing them with each other, to unravel the theory of diseases. It
happened, perhaps unfortunately for the inquirers into the knowledge of
diseases, that other sciences had received improvement previous to their
own; whence, instead of comparing the properties belonging to animated
nature with each other, they, idly ingenious, busied themselves in
attempting to explain the laws of life by those of mechanism and chemistry;
they considered the body as an hydraulic machine, and the fluids as passing
through a series of chemical changes, forgetting that animation was its
essential characteristic.

The great CREATOR of all things has infinitely diversified the works of his
hands, but has at the same time stamped a certain similitude on the
features of nature, that demonstrates to us, that _the whole is one family
of one parent_. On this similitude is founded all rational analogy; which,
so long as it is concerned in comparing the essential properties of bodies,
leads us to many and important discoveries; but when with licentious
activity it links together objects, otherwise discordant, by some fanciful
similitude; it may indeed collect ornaments for wit and poetry, but
philosophy and truth recoil from its combinations.

The want of a theory, deduced from such strict analogy, to conduct the
practice of medicine is lamented by its professors; for, as a great number
of unconnected facts are difficult to be acquired, and to be reasoned from,
the art of medicine is in many instances less efficacious under the
direction of its wisest practitioners; and by that busy crowd, who either
boldly wade in darkness, or are led into endless error by the glare of
false theory, it is daily practised to the destruction of thousands; add to