It seems to me that there is something very unreasonable in the plan of a great many of the books intended to introduce young people to the various branches of Natural History, which have been recently published. The chief aim of their authors seems to have been to combine brevity with comprehensiveness. Brevity is, without doubt, a great advantage, inasmuch as the proverb is true, that a great book is a great evil; but in my opinion comprehensiveness ought not to be attempted in books intended for children. If it were desirable, I might indeed confidently say, that it can never be obtained within the necessary limits; and the attempt to effect it, will very often reduce the work to a mere dry table of classification. However neat and systematic tables of genera and species, and lists of names may look, they can never convey to the young the elements of sound scientific method; and will seldom fail in being useless or disgusting to the mind, at an age when it is seeking for that sort of knowledge which will exercise the understanding, without burdening the memory. This healthy appetite ought to be carefully cultivated; and I am satisfied that if it were so, from the earliest stage of education, we should have but few complaints of bad memories. The memory is apt to vanish from those who would make an idol of it; and I am disposed to think that its cultivation may very safely be omitted, as a direct object of education, if due care is taken to keep the understanding active, and to present the matter on which it is to be engaged in the most entertaining form possible. In fact, what is often termed "a good memory," that is, a ready recollection independent of the connections which are made solely by the understanding, is, as we may see by its fruits in many persons of feeble intellect, by no means desirable. An apt example of such a memory is afforded, in what Dame Quickly says to Sir John Falstaff, when she reminds him of a mixed multitude of unimportant circumstances, with no other principle of arrangement or connection, than what was supplied by proximity of time and place.

I would not, however, willingly be supposed to recommend books, in which systematic arrangement, or the most scrupulous regard to accurate statement, is overlooked. I had particularly in view that numerous class of little books, which under various names come out in series, each volume professing in a manner to comprise the whole of the branch of Natural History which may be the subject of it, by its containing a mere arrangement of the names of the phenomena which the branch includes. There is another and widely different class of books, in which stories from travellers and other idle gossip of the like kind, are compiled in an undigested mass, without regard to the different names by which the same thing may be called, and not unfrequently to a common respect for truth, which is not much less to be deprecated.

And yet to books of this latter description, often of a very unworthy character, it is that many of us owe the first calling into consciousness of that taste which may have made us travellers or naturalists, or lovers of knowledge. I wish that, without copying the example of their authors, we should learn a lesson from them, and put it in practice, by striving to form a taste to enjoy knowledge in them we have to teach, before we attempt any mode of systematic instruction.

The following little book has been written under the impressions which I have here stated. I have selected a few of such phenomena of the Kingdoms of Nature, as seemed to me to have in them most to excite wonder and admiration; and I have sought to convey distinct notions with the least possible use of technical language; neither forgetting the connection of things, nor overloading the statements with matters that are merely expletive of an arbitrary system. How far I may have succeeded, is for my little friends, and their instructors, who have approved of my other books, to decide. Wishing the former as much pleasure in the reading, as I have had, for their sakes, in the writing, I take my leave of them.

P. P.