The Dedication of a work like this, destined to preserve all the names it enrols in the sculpture-like immortality of science, naturally delays us for a moment. Of the foreign teacher and friend to whom the author owes some of his earliest lessons, and of that group of our own citizens, most of them still living, who lent their united efforts to the enterprise of publication after it was commenced, we need not speak individually. But we cannot pass over the name of FRANCIS CALLEY GRAY without a word of grateful remembrance for one who was the friend and adviser of the author in planning the publication of the work before us. We who remember his varied culture, his large and fluent discourse, with its formidable accuracy of knowledge and gracious suavity of utterance, his taste in literature and art, which made his home a suite of princely cabinets, his generous and elegant hospitality, which scholars and artists knew so well,—counting him as the peer, and in many points the more than peer of such as the wide world of letters is proud to claim,—are pleased to see that his cherished name will be read by the students of unborn generations on the first leaf of this noble record of the science of our own.
The PREFACE which follows the Dedication is full of grateful acknowledgments to the many friends of science, in all parts of the country, who came forward to lend their aid in various forms, especially in collecting and transmitting specimens from the most widely remote sections of the continent. The pious zeal of Mr. Winthrop Sargent, who brought a cargo of living turtles more than a thousand miles to the head-quarters of testudinous learning at Cambridge, is only paralleled by the memorable act of the Pisans in transporting ship-loads of holy soil from Palestine to fill their Campo Santo. Genius is marked by nothing more distinctly than that it makes the world its tributary. He from whose lips it speaks has but to look calmly into the eyes of dull routine, of jaded toil, of fickle childhood, and utter the words, "Follow me." Custom-house officials close their books, tired fishermen leave their nets, riotous boys forsake their play, to do the master's bidding. Is he making collections for some great purpose of study? Piece by piece the fragmentary spoils flow in upon him, of all sizes, shapes, and hues; a chaos of confused riches, perhaps only a wealth of rubbish, as they lie at his feet. One by one they fall into harmonious relations, until the meaningless heap has become a vast mosaic, where nothing is too minute to fill some interstice, nothing too angular to fit some corner, nothing so dull or brilliant of tint that it will not furnish its fraction of light or shadow. Such has been the history of those years of labor the results of which these volumes present to us. Whatever may have been said of the devotion of our countrymen to material interests, the wise and winning lips had only to speak, and such a currency of plastrons and carapaces was set in circulation, that the contemplative stranger who saw the mighty coinage of Chelonia flowing in upon Cambridge might well have thought that the national idea was not the Almighty Dollar, but the Almighty Turtle.
Mr. Agassiz places a high estimate on the intelligence as well as the kind spirit of his adopted countrymen. "There is not a class of learned men here," he says, "distinct from the other cultivated members of the community. On the contrary, so general is the desire for knowledge, that I expect to see my book read by operatives, by fishermen, by farmers, quite as extensively as by the students of our colleges, or by the learned professions; and it is but proper that I should endeavor to make myself understood by all."
The deficiencies of our scientific libraries, and the want of a class of elementary works upon Natural History, such as are widely circulated in Europe, are adverted to and alleged as a reason for entering into details which the professional naturalist might think misplaced.
We quote one paragraph entire from the Preface, as not susceptible of being abridged, and as briefly stating those general facts with regard to the work which all our readers must desire to know.
"I have a few words more to say respecting the two first volumes, now ready for publication. Considering the uncertainty of human life, I have wished to bring out at once a work that would exemplify the nature of the investigations I have been tracing during the last ten years, and show what is likely to be the character of the whole series. I have aimed, therefore, in preparing these two volumes, to combine them in such a manner as that they should form a whole. The First Part contains an exposition of the general views I have arrived at thus far, in my studies of Natural History. The Second Part shows how I have attempted to apply these results to the special study of Zoology, taking the order of Testudinata as an example. I believe, that, in America, where turtles are everywhere common, and greatly diversified, a student could not make a better beginning than by a careful perusal of this part, specimens in hand, with constant reference to the second chapter of the First Part. The Third Part exemplifies the bearing of Embryology upon these general questions, while it contains the fullest illustration of the embryonic growth of the Testudinata."
The Preface closes with honorable mention of the gentlemen who have furnished direct assistance in the preparation of the work, and especially of Mr. Clark in microscopic observation and illustration, and of Mr. Sonrel in drawing the zoological figures.
The LIST OF SUBSCRIBERS is not without its special meaning and interest. If, as has been said, the grade of civilization in any community can be estimated by the amount of sulphuric acid it consumes, the extent to which a work like this has been called for in different sections of the country may to some extent be considered an index of its intellectual aspirations, if not of its actual progress. 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."