Volume 1

Oysters, and all about them : being a complete history of the titular subject, exhaustive on all points of necessary and curious information from the earliest writers to those of the present time, with numerous additions, facts, and notes / by John R. Philpots.

  • Philpots, John Richards.
Date:
1890-1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Oysters, and all about them : being a complete history of the titular subject, exhaustive on all points of necessary and curious information from the earliest writers to those of the present time, with numerous additions, facts, and notes / by John R. Philpots. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    24/652 (page 18)
    plants and insects knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedgerows can assume. Whoever has not sought for fossils has little idea of the poetical associations that surround the places where embedded treasures were found. Whoever at the sea-side has not had a microscope and aquarium have yet to learn what the highest pleasures of the sea-side are.” Herbert Spencer. Were I to choose a supplementary title, I should call this work a Zoological Gleaner, wherein the Nineteenth Century culture—the literary culture which, according to Matthew Arnold, acquaints itself with “ the best that is thought and known in the world” and the scientific culture which, according to Mr. Huxley, is simply “ common sense at its best”—receives the full measure of the poetic interest which lies in common things. Apart from the love for my subject which has impelled, upheld, and encouraged me to proceed in my self imposed task ; apart from the aim to clothe it in “ the best that is thought and known in the world ” relative thereto, I have ever had in view the aspiring ambition to make this work readable by all, and at the same time useful to my brother naturalists. Nor have I neglected the advice of Horace : “ Omne tulit punctum, qui miscuit utile dulci Lectorem delectando pariterque monendo.” In allusion to which says the late distinguished naturalist, John Gwyn Jeffreys : (a) {a) “British Conchology,” Introduction, vol. ii.