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. CONTENTS. PART I.--WONDERS OF THE EARTH. Blah. Page Chap. I. Parley explains how the Strata of the Earth are placed 1 Chap. II. What creatures once lived where Dorsetshire now is 5 The Icthyosaurus 6 The Plesiosaurus 14 The Pterodactyle, &c. 17