The true business of a nomenclator is not to enlarge his list, but to form rational comparisons in order to contract it. Nothing can be more easy than, by perusing all the authors on animals, and by selecting their names and phrases, to form a table which however will always be long, in proportion as the enquiry is superficial; while nothing can be more difficult than to compare them with that judgment and discernment which is necessary to reduce that table to its proper dimensions. I said before, and now repeat, that in the whole known part of the globe there are not above 200 species of quadrupeds, including among them 40 species of apes. To each of these, therefore, we had only to appropriate a name; and to retain 200 names, only a very moderate exertion of memory is required; for what purpose then are quadrupeds formed into classes and genera, which are nothing more than props to serve the memory in the recollection of plants, which are so very numerous, and often so very similar. But instead of a list of 200 quadrupeds we have volumes heaped upon volumes full of intricate names and phrases. Why introduce an unintelligible jargon, when we may be understood by pronouncing a simple name? Why change terms merely to form classes? When a dozen animals are included under the name, for example, of _the Rabbit_, why is the Rabbit itself omitted, and must be sought for under the genus of _the Hare_? Is it not absurd and ridiculous to form classes in which the most remote genera are assembled together; to put in the first, for example, man and the bat; the elephant and scaly lizard in the second; the lion and ferret in the third; the hog and the mole in the fourth; and the rhinoceros and the rat in the fifth? Ideas so vague and ill-conceived can never maintain their ground. These works are destroyed by their own authors, one edition contradicting another, and neither of them approved but by children, or by such as are always the dupes of mystery, mistaking the appearance of method for the reality of science. By comparing the fourth edition of Linnæus's Systema Naturæ with the tenth, we find man is no longer classed with the bat, but with the scaly lizard; that the elephant, hog, and rhinoceros, instead of being classed as before with the scaly lizard, mole, and rat, are all three huddled together with the shrew-mouse. In the former he had reduced all quadrupeds to five classes, but in the latter he divides them into seven. From these alterations we may form some idea of those introduced among the genera, and how the species have been jumbled and confounded. According to the same author there are two species[D] of men, the man of day and the man of night, and that these are so very distinct that they ought not to be regarded as varieties of the same species. Is not this adding fable to absurdity? and were it not better to remain silent with respect to matters of which we are ignorant, than to found essential characters,