Methods of Study in Natural History

Front Cover
Ticknor and Fields, 1866 - Animals - 319 pages

From inside the book

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 20 - THE GLACIERS OF THE ALPS : being a Narrative of Excursions and Ascents. An Account of the Origin and Phenomena of Glaciers, and an Exposition of the Physical Principles to which they are related.
Page 23 - I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature," Louis Agassiz said in summing up the result of his life's work, "and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg, — this is all.
Page 20 - Dictionary of the Noted Names of Fiction ; including also Familiar Pseudonyms, Surnames bestowed on Eminent Men, and Analogous Popular Appellations often referred to in Literature and Conversation.
Page 123 - Does not every member of the crow family caw, whether it be the jackdaw, the jay, or the magpie, the rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw that seems to make the silence and solitude deeper ? Compare all the sweet warblers of the songster family — the nightingales, the thrushes, the mockingbirds, the robins; they differ in the greater or less perfection of their note, but the same kind of voice runs through the whole group. These affinities...
Page 42 - when scientific truth must cease to be the property of the few, when it must be woven into the common life of the world...
Page v - Paleontology, the former showing us norms of development as distinct and persistent for each group as are the fossil types of each period revealed to us by the latter; and that the experiments upon domesticated animals and cultivated plants, on which its adherents base their views, are entirely foreign to the matter in hand, since the varieties thus brought about by the fostering care of man are of an entirely different character from those observed among wild species. And while their positive evidence...
Page 14 - A History of the Administration of the Department of the Gulf in the year 1862. With an Account of the Capture of New Orleans, and a Sketch of the Previous Career of the General, Civil and Military.
Page 166 - But these also have their bounds within the sea: they in their turn reach the limit beyond which they are forbidden by the laws of their nature to pass, and there they also pause. But the Coral wall continues its steady progress ; for here the lighter kinds set in, — the Madrepores (p. 167), the Millepores, and a great variety of Sea-Fans (p. 167, below) and Corallines, and the reef is crowned at last with a many-colored shrubbery of low feathery growth.
Page 122 - ... cat as its stately and majestic form does to the smaller, softer, more peaceful aspect of the cat. Yet notwithstanding the difference in their size, who can look at the lion, whether in his more sleepy mood, as he lies curled up in the corner of his cage, or in his fiercer moments of hunger or of rage, without being reminded of a cat ? And this is not merely the resemblance of one carnivorous animal to another; for no one was ever reminded of a dog or wolf by a lion. Again, all the horses and...

Bibliographic information