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twelve, or more, and had faid quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, amphibious creatures, cetaceous fish, oviparous fish, soft fish, cruftaceous fish, shell fish, terreftrial infects, marine infects, and those found in fresh water, &c. he would have expreffed himself more distinctly, and his divifions would have been more true and lefs arbitrary; for, in general, the more the number of the divifions of natural productions is augmented, the nearer we shall approach to the truth, fince only individuals do really exift in nature, and fince genufes, orders, and claffes, only exift in our own imaginations. Upon examining the general characters, which he makes ufe of, and the manner in which he makes his particular divifions, we fhall find defects therein, that are much more effential; for example, a general character, fuch as that taken from the mammæ or teats, in the divifion of quadrupeds, ought at leaft to belong to all quadrupeds, and yet from the time of Ariftotle, we know that the horfe has no mammæ.

He divides the clafs of quadrupeds into five orders: the first he calls anthromorpha, or those refembling the human form; the fecond, fera, or wild beafts; the third, glires, or wild rats; the fourth, jumenta, or beafts of burden; and the fifth, pecora, or cattle; and according to him all quadrupeds are included in thefe five claffes. We may discover, by the bare enumeration of these orders, that this divifion is not only arbitrary, but very injudiciously made: for he places in this first order, man, the monkey, the Guinea lubbard, and the hell lizard. Let us go on to the fecond order, which he calls wild beafts;

and here indeed he begins with the lion and tiger, but he proceeds with the cat, the weazle, the otter, the fea-calf, the dog, the bear, the badger; and he ends with the hedgehog, the mole and the bat. Who could ever have imagined, that the name of a wild beast could have been given to the bat, the mole, and the hedge-hog! that fuch domeftic animals as the dog and the cat were wild beafts! and is there not herein as great an ambiguity with regard to good fenfe, as well as with regard to the words? But let us proceed to the third clafs, namely, the wild rats of M. Linnæus, which are the porcupine, the hare, the fquirrel, the beaver, and the common rat. I declare, that in all this, I fee but' one fpecies of rats, which, in fact, is the wild rat. The fourth order is that of beafts of carriage, which are the elephant, the hippopotamus, or river horfe, the fhrew-moufe, the horfe and the pig. What a strange, what a chimerical arrangement this! His fifth and laft order, is cattle, which comprizes the camel, the deer, the goat, the ram, and the ox. what difference is there not evidently between a camel and a ram, or between a deer and a goat? And what reafon can there be to pretend that there are animals of the fame clafs, if it be not this, that having abfolutely a mind to form claffes, and but a small number of them, we must comprize therein beasts of all kinds? In fine, by examining the laft divifions of animals into particular fpecies, we find that the lupus cervinus is no other than a fpecies of cats; the fox and wolf a fpecies of dogs; the civet a fpecies of badger; the Indian pig a fpecies of hare; the water-rat a species of B b 4

But

beaver ;

beaver; the rhinoceros a fpecies of elephant: and the afs a fpecies of horses, &c. and all this for no other reafon but that there is fome little analogy between the number of the teats and the teeth of thefe animals, or fome like refemblance in the figure of their hoofs. And this is, however, without omitting any thing, the whole to which this fyftem of nature for the four-footed animals is reducible. Would it not be more fimple, natural, and true, to say that an afs is an afs, and a cat a cat, than to make, without knowing for what reason, an afs a horse, and a cat a lynx, or wild spotted cat?

One may, by this flight fpecimen, judge of all the reft of Linnæus's fyftem. Serpents, according to this author, are amphibious animals, lobsters infects, and not only fo, but infects of the fame order with lice and fleas; and all fhell-fish, cruftaceous, and foft fish are worms; oyfters, the thorn-back, fea-ftars, fcuttle-fifh, &c. are, according to him, no other than worms. Is there then any thing further neceffary, to evince how arbitrary, how chimerical his divifions are, and how ill grounded his fyftem is ?

A defcription of an American quadruped rarely feen in Europe, which Linnæus has placed in the clafs of bears, and, for diftinction, called the long-tailed bear.

HIS animal was not much

ably long and foft, but longeft upo the belly; the colour was in fome places black, and in fome a mixture of yellow and brown; the back was chiefly black, not however without fome mixture of brown; on the contrary, the neck, the head, and the tail, were rather tawney than black; the face was whitish, with yellow ftripes that came down between the eyes, from the top of the head to the nofe; the hair round the eyes was almost entirely black; the ears had more white than yellow, and the legs were thinly covered with fhort brown hair; the tail was confiderably thicker towards the body than towards the end, and was marked with three black rings, and three yellow, very beautiful and exact, growing gradually narrower as the tail grew lefs: the general figure of the head was triangular; it was largest in the upper and hinder part, and gradually diminished towards the nose, which was very fharp, with two noftrils of a femicircular figure; on each fide of the mouth were fmellers, or whiskers, of white briftley hair, thofe of the upper lip being longer than thofe of the lower; the upper lip itself being much the longest, so as to project beyond the other an inch and an half: the ears were large towards the base, and sharp at the extremity; they were remarkable for their quick motion, and were provided with very strong muscles.

The eyes were not large in pro

its length from the extremity of the trunk to the tail was fomething more than three feet, and the tail itfelf was one foot and an inch long; the body was covered all over very thick with hair, that was remark

of them had a cataract, and both of them were manifeftly covered with a nictitating membrane; this membrane, which was turned in the form of an arch, extended from the inner to the outward corner,

where

where it ftrongly adhered, as well as lower down. It was bound to each corner of the eye by a fmall tendon; it was coloured with red veffels, and, as it was extremely moveable, it was drawn up with great facility when it perfectly covered or clofed the whole eye.

The feet, or paws, were not very long, but those of the hinder legs were much larger and ftronger than thofe of the fore; the bottoms of them were quite without hair, but were covered from the talons to the heel, with a thick hard fkin of a brown red colour; this fkin was marked with many lines like thofe of the palm of the hand; and rifes higher on the hind feet than the fore, as the animal fometimes walks erect upon them.

Each foot terminated in five claws, like thofe of a bear; the first was very short, the fecond long, the third and the fourth were of an equal length, but both longer than the fecond; and the fifth was a little shorter than these, but somewhat longer than the firft; each of these claws terminated in a

accounts in many particulars wholly irreconcilable with each other.

The Brafilians call it the Coeti, and by fome writers it has been confidered as a fox, by fome as a badger, and by others as a cat. The reafon why Linnæus has called it a bear, is its having five claws, and the short one or thumb-claws, placed on the outfide; but it differs fo much from a bear, both externally and internally, that the propriety of placing it in the bear clafs may be well doubted. It is very nimble, and climbs trees as nimbly as a monkey, running to the extremity of the branches which bend under its weight. Its manner of eating is like that of a dog, holding its food, whether vegetable or animal, be tween its fore-paws.

An account of a Cat, that lived twenty-fix months without drinking. From the Hiftory of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, for the year 1753.

hooked.

The whole animal, which was very fat, weighed fixteen pounds and an half. It was a female, and the uterus opened below the abdomen by a very large external aperture.

By its internal structure, it appeared to be formed both for carnivorous and granivorous food. It is found both in North and South America, from whence the fkins, which are excellent furs, are fent in confiderable quantities to Europe. It has been defcribed by many writers of great authority, particularly Wormius, Ray, and Linnæus, but with fuch difference as makes the

Royal Academy of Infcriptions and Belles-Lettres, to whom the academy is indebted for several curious obfervations, was pleafed to communicate to it this year a very fingular one. Having remarked how cats often habituate themfelves, and oftener than one could wifh, to dry warrens, where they certainly cannot find drink but very feldom, he fancied that these animals could do for a very long time without drinking. To fee whether his notions were well grounded, he made an experiment on a very large and fat caftrated cat he had at his difpofal. He began by retrenching by little and little

folid, without any aperture, and measured about four lines in diameter, and twelve in length. This hook was not faftened to the bone, of the forehead, but to the temporal bones, by a kind of future, in the place where thefe two bones join, near the bafe of the pericrane, in which there were not the leaft traces or orbits, fo that eyes were totally wanting; two ears, however, appeared at the lower part of the head, near the commencement of the neck; they were furrounded by a kind of unhapely chin, full of little red knobs, like thofe of a turkey cock; the little ears, which were of the fame colour, were bald, and the aperture pierced the bone near the base of the cranium, which was fupported by eight little vertebræ, inftead of fix; the ufual number in a dog's neck. The uppermoft of thefe vertebræ was fomething larger and thicker than the reft.

This fact is related by M. Eiler, who takes this opportunity to explode the notion, that the force of imagination in the mother can imprefs any mark upon the embryo, or mutilate or deform it. Our knowledge of nature is in general fo fuperficial and imperfect, that it is fcarce ever difficult to raife objections, which it is impoffible to remove. It is easy to object against what is but imperfectly understood, and often the objection rifes from the imperfection of our knowledge; but to remove the objection, the fubject must be understood perfectly; and therefore it is no wonder that among beings who understand nothing perfectly, or at leaft, whofe knowledge extends very little farther than phænomena and effects, objections should ftand unremoved

against all the caufes that human wit has been able to affign for facts which are too notorious to be denied. M. Eller is one of the unfor tunate philofophers who has fhewn the paucity of his knowledge, both by his objections to the opinion he would remove, and his reafons for that he would eftablish.

Imagination, fays he, is nothing more than that operation of a thinking being, which reprefents in it the image or idea of abfent objects which have been before introduced by the organs of fenfe. Imagination can operate only by the nerves, and the imagination of the mother cannot affect the infant, because the nerves of the mother have no connection with thofe of the infant; the connection between the mother and infant fubfifting only by means of the placenta, which adheres to the womb, not by the continuity but the contiguity only of its verfels, which are not broken, when the placenta is feparated from the matrix, and because there is no continuity, or anaftomafis, even between the blood-veffels of the mother and the fœtus, and confequently, no circulation common to the mother and infant, tho' it is confeffed that the innumerable veffels which are diftributed over the placenta do, in their minute ramifications, mingle with thofe of the matrix, and like the fibres of the roots of vegetables, may imbibe the blood that exudes from the extremities of the arteries of the matrix, as the little veins of the matrix may in their turn re-absorb the blood which the arteries of the umbilical chord of the placenta conwey from the infant towards the womb.

But, if imagination can operate

only