It is proper to add here that Cousin Benedict was, meanwhile, neither idle nor unoccupied. On the contrary, he was a worker. His only passion—natural history—absorbed him entirely.
To say "Natural History" is to say a great deal.
We know that the different parts of which this science is composed are zoology, botany, mineralogy, and geology.
Now Cousin Benedict was, in no sense, a botanist, nor a mineralogist, nor a geologist.
Was he, then, a zoologist in the entire acceptation of the word, a kind of Cuvier of the New World, decomposing an animal by analysis, or putting it together again by synthesis, one of those profound connoisseurs, versed in the study of the four types to which modern science refers all animal existence, vertebrates, mollusks, articulates, and radiates? Of these four divisions, had the artless but studious savant observed the different classes, and sought the orders, the families, the tribes, the genera, the species, and the varieties which distinguish them?
No.
Had Cousin Benedict devoted himself to the study of the vertebrates, mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes?
No.
Was it to the mollusks, from the cephalopodes to the bryozoans, that he had given his preference, and had malacology no more secrets for him?
Not at all.