NATURAL HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES.—­On the 26th of May, Mr. G.W.  Featherstonhaugh, of Philadelphia, sends me a printed copy of a prospectus for a “Monthly American Journal of Natural Science,” with the following note:  “As the annexed prospectus will explain itself, I shall only say, that I shall be most happy to receive any paper from you for insertion, on subjects connected with Natural History.  Your minute acquaintance with the North-western Territory must have placed many materials in your possession, and I trust you may be induced to transfer some of them to the periodical about to be issued.

“We consider Mr. Eaton’s geological notions and nomenclature as very empirical here, as they are considered in France and England, and his day has passed by.”

The prospectus says:  “Amidst these general contributions to science, it is painful to perceive what conspicuous blanks are yet left for America to fill up, and especially in those important branches, American geology and American organic remains.  This feeling is greatly increased by the occasional taunts and sneers we see directed against us in foreign scientific works.  They are aimed, it is true, against individuals insignificant enough to elude them, and therefore the larger body, the nation, is hit and wounded by them.  Neither is there any defence open to us.  We send abroad gigantic stories of huge antediluvian lizards, ‘larger than the largest size,’ and we ourselves are kept upon the stare at our own wonders from Georgia to Maine, until we find out we have been exulting over the stranded remains of a common spermaceti whale.  At this present moment, a huge animal dug out of the Big Bone Lick, sixty feet long, and twenty-five feet high, is parading through the columns of the European newspapers, after making its progress through our own.  This is, what every naturalist supposed it be, also a great imposition.  Within these few days, drums and trumpets have been sounded for other monsters.  A piece of one of our common coal plants is conjured into a petrified rattlesnake, and one of the most familiar fossils solemnly announced all the way from Canada, under a name exploded, and long forgotten by naturalists.  All these gibes and reproaches we ought to have been spared.  There ought to have been the ready means amongst us, together with the independence and intelligence, to put down these impostures and puerilities as they arose.”

This is well said, and if it be intended to refer to the popular class, who have not made science a study; to men who make wheelbarrows or sell cotton and sugar—­to the same classes of men, in fact, who in England, are busied in the daily pursuits by which they earn their bread, leaving science to scientific men, but respecting its truths, cannot tell “a hawk from a handsaw”—­it is all true enough.  But if it be applied to the power and determination of American mind, professedly, or as in a private capacity, devoted to the various