you

fate, even at last, by the aid of violence, would you abandon every animal to the same wretchedness, only a hundred-fold multiplied by the horrors of want and hunger which he must, by growing every day more infirm, be every day growing more incapable of appeasing ?-Or would cut short the evil at once, by destroying death itself and thus rendering every animal immortal? They would not thank you for such an interference, nor applaud the vain benevolence that might dictate it; an interference which, by preventing the necessity for offspring, would extirpate from the animal frame its best feelings; which would extinguish the wise and harmonious distribution into sexes; and make an equal inroad on the pleasures of sense and the endearments of instinct.

It is granted, that a great part of the globe is an inhospitable wilderness; that it consists, to a considerable extent, of waste inaccessible jungle over-run by rapacious beasts and reptiles, of putrid swamps crowded by myriads of venomous insects, and of immense warrens burrowed by countless hordes of the hampster, the mole-rat, and the white ant. Even here, however, whereever life exists, it exists to those that possess it as an enjoyment; while these very scenes and these very animals only fill up what man has no occasion for, and equally and instantly disappear as soon as he presents himself, and exercises that industry and ingenuity which alone consti

tute his authority, and upon which alone his health and his happiness are made to depend.

But this is not all. While in their different gradations these outcasts from man are thus enjoying life themselves, they are preparing, in the best manner possible, the various tracts they occupy, for his future use and habitation. The soil that supports us, and gives us our daily bread, is nothing but a mixture of animal and vegetable materials; other substances indeed enter into it, but the great, the important, the active, and leavening constituent is of an organized origin. These materials, then, are perpetually forming, and accumulating, and rising into an unbounded and inexhaustible storehouse of subsequent riches and plenty by the alternate generation and decomposition of the different kinds and orders of plants and animals which thus fill up, and, as we are apt to believe, encumber the regions we are contemplating; regions which, though in our own day unexplored or abandoned both by savage and civilised man, may, in that revolution of countries and of governments which is perpetually passing before our eyes, become, in some future period, the seat of universal dominion, the emporium of taste and elegance, of virtue and the sciences. So the fairest fields of Rome were formed out of the putrid Pontine marshes, and England has become what she is, from being a land of bogs and of blights, of wolves, wild-boars, and gloomy forests.

LECTURE II.

ON ZOOLOGICAL SYSTEMS, AND THE DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERS OF ANIMALS.

(The subject continued.)

In our last lecture we took a momentary glance at the history of zoology as a science, noticed the primary features of the best methodical arrangements to which it has given, rise, and made some progress towards a brief delineation of that of Linnéus, which still takes the lead amidst the writers of the present day, and is hence chiefly entitled to attention in a course of popular study, generally collating it, however, with that of M. Cuvier, as we proceeded.

We observed that the Linnéan system comprehends all animals of every description whatever, under the six classes of mammals, birds, amphibials, fishes, insects, and worms. We pursued this arrangement in an ascending scale, as most consistent with the plan adopted at the opening of the present course of instruction; and commencing with the class of worms, finished with that of insects. It remains for us to prosecute the same rapid outline of inquiry through the four unexamined classes of fishes, amphibials, birds, and mammals.

FISHES are classically characterised in the Linnéan system as being always inhabitants of the water; swift in their motion and voracious in their appetite; breathing by means of gills, which are generally united by a bony arch; swimming by means of radiate fins, and for the most part covered over with cartilaginous scales. The class is divided into six orders; the ordinal characters being taken from the position of the ventral or belly fins, or from the substance of the gills. The orders are, apodal, fishes containing no ventral or belly fins; jugular, having the ventral fins before the pectoral; thoracic, having the ventral fins under the pectoral; abdominal, having the ventral fins behind the pectoral. In all these four, the rays or divisions of the gills are bony. In the fifth order, which is called branchiostegous, the gills are destitute of bony rays; and in the sixth, or chondropterygious order, the gills are cartilaginous; all which will be easiest explained by a few familiar examples. Into the general divisions of this class M. Cuvier has introduced no change of any importance whatever, his own sections and names running parallel with those of Linnéus.

The kind best calculated to elucidate the FIRST or APODAL ORDER, is the well known muræna or eel; since every one must have noticed, that this fish has no ventral, or, indeed, under fins of any kind. In many of its species, it has a very near approach to the serpent tribes; insomuch that several of them are called sea-serpents, and

by some naturalists are described as branches of the serpent genus. Even our own common eel, muræna Anguilla, is often observed to quit its proper element during the night, and, like the snake, to wander over the meadows in search of snails and worms.

The next genus I shall mention, is the gymnotus, of which one species, gymnotus electricus, is the electric eel, an inhabitant of the rivers of South America, from three to four feet long, and peculiarly distinguished by its power of inflicting an electrical shock, so severe as to benumb the limbs of those that are exposed to it. The shock is equally inflicted whether the fish be touched by the naked hand, or by a long stick. It is by this extraordinary power, which it employs alike defensively and offensively, that the electric eel escapes from the jaws of larger fishes, and is enabled to seize various smaller fishes as food for its own use. There are, however, a few other fishes, as we shall have occasion to notice in proceeding, that possess a similar power, as the torpedo of European seas, and especially of the Mediterranean, and the electric silurus of those of Africa.

The only other genus it will be necessary to glance at under this order, is the xiphias or sword-fish; so denominated from its long swordlike and serrated snout, with which it penetrates and destroys its prey. Its chief species is found in the European and other Mediterranean seas, sometimes not less than twenty feet long; is very