This is especially true of those remoter regions
where personal motives would exercise least influence. But without
instituting any comparisons, we may well be proud of this ample list
of twenty-five hundred subscribers, most of them citizens of the
republic,--"a support such as was never before offered to any
scientific man for purely scientific ends, without any reference to
government objects or direct practical aims."
Our analysis must confine itself mainly to the first of the three
parts into which these two volumes are divided. This first part it
is that contains those large results which every thinker must desire
to learn from one whose life has been devoted to the searching and
contemplative study of Nature. It is in the realm of thought here
explored, that Natural Science, whose figure we are wont to look
down upon, crouching to her task, like him of the muck-rake, as he
painfully gathers together his sticks and straws, rises erect, and
lifts her forehead into the upper atmosphere of philosophy, where
the clouds are indeed thickest, but the stars are nearest. The
second and third parts belong more exclusively to the professed
students of Natural History in its different special departments.
Our notice of these divisions of the work must therefore be
comparatively brief.
The first chapter of the first part has for its title, "The
fundamental relations of animals to one another and to the world in
which they live, as the basis of the natural system of animals.
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