This we must necessarily
leave to the journals devoted to scientific matters, and the class
of students most intimate with these departments of Natural Science.
Yet the American who asks for a model to work by in his
investigations will find a great deal more than the "North American
Testudinata" in the part to which that title is prefixed. The
principles of classification exemplified, the methods of description
illustrated, the rules of nomenclature tested,--what matter is it
whether the _gran maestro_ has chosen this or that string to play
the air upon, when each has compass enough for all its melody?
Still more forcibly does this comment apply to the elaborate and
ample division of the work embracing the Embryology of the Turtle.
He who has mastered the details of this section has at his feet the
whole broad realm of which this province holds one of the
key-fortresses. _Ex testudine naturam_.
We are unwilling to speak of the illustrations comparatively
without more extended means of judgment than we have at hand. But
that they are of superlative excellence, brilliant, delicate,
accurate, life-like, and nature-like, is what none will dispute.
Look at these turtles, models of real-estate owners as they are,
Observe No. 13, Plate IV.,--"Chelydra Serpentina,"--"snapper",
or "snappin' turtle," in the vernacular.
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