constitution became weaker every day, and there was no restoring it. After casting about this way and that, there seemed but one resource left to me--to take advantage of a steamer bound for Fu (_i.e._, Shanghai), and then to return by way of the Yangtsze River to my native place and put myself under medical advice. Prostrate I implore the Heavenly Compassion to grant me three months' leave of absence, in order to establish a complete cure, so that perhaps I may not contract disease that will prove incurable. After your servant has got home it will be his duty to report early the day of his arrival, and he earnestly desires that he may be restored to health. Then I will return to the capital to resume my functions, and implore that some trifling post may be given me that I may testify my gratitude by strenuous exertions, like a dog or a horse. Wherefore I, your humble servant, now beg for leave of absence on account of my ill-health, and respectfully present the petition in which my request is lucidly set forth, entreating with reverence that the sacred glance may rest upon it." ANIMALS AND PLANTS. In the first of the present series of Essays it was pointed out[4] that the number of kinds of living creatures is so prodigious that it would be a hopeless task for any man to attempt to grasp the leading facts of their natural history, save with the help of a well-arranged system of classification. Such a system enables the student to consider the subjects of his study collectively in masses--masses arranged in a series of groups, which are successively smaller and more and more subordinate. By "subordinate groups" are meant groups which are successively contained one within the other. As an example of such subordinate grouping we may take the group of familiar objects denoted by the word "money." This group contains within it the large subordinate groups, "paper money" and "metallic money;" the latter group again contains the more subordinate and smaller groups, "gold money," "silver money," and "copper money," and these respectively contain still more subordinate and smaller groups. Thus, the group "silver money" contains the subordinate groups--(1) crowns, (2) half-crowns, (3) florins, (4) shillings, (5) sixpences, &c.; and any one of these (_e.g._, shillings) is further divisible into groups of "shillings" of the coinage of different reigns.