Cloister and the Hearth, The, 52.

De Vere, Aubrey, Poems by, 54. 
Dickens’s Works, Household Edition, 55.

Harris’s Insects Injurious to Vegetation, 55.

John Brent, 54.

Leigh Hunt, Correspondence of, 55. 
Lessons in Life, 51.

Mueller’s Lectures on the Science of Language, 51.

Newman’s Homeric Translation in Theory and
  in Practice, 51.

Pauli’s Pictures of Old England, 55.

Record of an Obscure Man, 55.

Tragedy of Errors, 55.

Willmott’s English Sacred Poetry, 52.

FOREIGN LITERATURE, 54, 55.

OBITUARY, 51.

RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS, 52, 53, 54, 55.

* * * * *

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A Magazine of literature, art, and politics.

* * * * *

Vol.  IX.—­January, 1862.—­No.  LI.

* * * * *

METHODS OF STUDY IN NATURAL HISTORY.

I.

It is my intention, in this series of papers, to give the history of the progress in Natural History from the beginning,—­to show how men first approached Nature,—­how the facts of Natural History have been accumulated, and how those facts have been converted into science.  In so doing, I shall present the methods employed in Natural History on a wider scale and with broader generalizations than if I limited myself to the study as it exists to-day.  The history of humanity, in its efforts to understand the Creation, resembles the development of any individual mind engaged in the same direction.  It has its infancy, with the first recognition of surrounding objects; and, indeed, the early observers seem to us like children in their first attempts to understand the world in which they live.  But these efforts, that appear childish to us now, were the first steps in that field of knowledge which is so extensive that all our progress seems only to show us how much is left to do.

Aristotle is the representative of the learning of antiquity in Natural Science.  The great mind of Greece in his day, and a leader in all the intellectual culture of his time, he was especially a naturalist, and his work on Natural History is a record not only of his own investigations, but of all preceding study in this department.  It is evident that even then much had been done, and, in allusion to certain peculiarities of the human frame, which he does not describe in full, he refers his readers to familiar works, saying, that illustrations in point may be found in anatomical text-books.[1]