recollecting that they are extracts from travellers, and supposing that the ignorance of the ancient tourists, and their love of the marvellous, betrayed them into the same exaggerations, and dictated the same vague and superficial descriptions, with which we are shocked in so many of their modern successors. It may likewise be said of Pliny, that he does not always give the true sense of the authors whom he translates, especially when treating of the designation of species. Although we have now very few means of judging with certainty respecting errors of this kind, it is easy to prove, that on several occasions he has substituted for the Greek word which denoted a particular animal in Aristotle, a Latin word which belongs to another species. It is true that one of the great difficulties experienced by the ancients was that of fixing a nomenclature; and the defects of their systems are more perceptible in Pliny than in any other writer. The descriptions, or rather the imperfect indications, which he gives, are almost always insufficient for recognising the species, when tradition has not preserved the names; and there is even a very great number, of which he mentions the names without joining to them any character, or affording any means by which they may be distinguished. Could there be any longer a doubt as to the advantages of the systems invented by the moderns, it would be dissipated by finding that all that the ancients have said of the virtues of their plants is lost to us, from our not being able to distinguish the species to which they assigned them.--Were we to give credit to all that he says in the part of his work devoted to Materia Medica, there is not a disease incident to humanity for which nature has not provided twenty remedies; and unfortunately, during two centuries after the revival of letters, all these absurdities were confidently repeated by physicians. It must therefore be admitted, that with reference to facts the volume of Pliny is of no real interest, excepting in regard to the manners and customs of the ancients, the processes which they followed in the arts, and some particulars respecting geography, of which we should otherwise be ignorant.[F] The Historia Naturalis was the last work which Pliny wrote, and is the only one that has come down to us. It is not a treatise on natural history, as that term is at present limited; but, besides relating all that he knew of animals, plants, and minerals, it embraces astronomy, geography, agriculture, commerce, medicine, and the arts; so that it may be considered as a cyclopaedia rather than a publication on any particular subject. It is divided into thirty-seven books. The first contains a dedication to the Emperor Titus Vespasian, together with a summary of the following sections, and the names of the authors who contributed to them.