The botanist : being the botanical part of a course of lectures on natural history, delivered in the University at Cambridge : together with a discourse on the principle of vitality / by Benjamin Waterhouse.

  • Waterhouse, Benjamin, 1754-1846.
Date:
1811
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The botanist : being the botanical part of a course of lectures on natural history, delivered in the University at Cambridge : together with a discourse on the principle of vitality / by Benjamin Waterhouse. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    PREFACE, There are few people of education who have not a pretty accurate idea of what is meant by the terms Astronomy, or Chemistry ; but there are not many among us, who have a satisfactory idea of the term Natural History. If when puzzled they recur to the meaning of words, they learn, that Natural History is a treasure of the mind kept by memory; whereas most people conceive it to be merely a knowledge of those criteria by which we are enabled to distinguish, at first sight, one nat- ural body from another ; and therefore instead of an history, is frequently a mere description of a fix- ed and permanent substance : and if they consult those splendid and costly books, in which the gra- phic art almost equals nature, they still wonder why those pictures are called histories, since they do not express those alterations and successive 2