e early pages of his first volume protested against
the introduction of either "_plaisanterie_" or "_equivoque_" (p. 25)
into a serious work. But I have observed that there is an unconscious
irony in most disclaimers of this nature. When a writer begins by saying
that he has "an ineradicable tendency to make things clear," we may
infer that we are going to be puzzled; so when he shows that he is
haunted by a sense of the impropriety of allowing humour to intrude into
his work, we may hope to be amused as well as interested. As showing how
far the objection to humour which he expressed upon his twenty-fifth
page succeeded in carrying him safely over his twenty-sixth and
twenty-seventh, I will quote the following, which begins on page
twenty-six:--

"Aldrovandus is the most learned and laborious of all naturalists; after
sixty years of work he has left an immense number of volumes behind him,
which have been printed at various times, the greater number of them
after his death. It would be possible to reduce them to a tenth part if
we could rid them of all useless and foreign matter, and of a prolixity
which I find almost overwhelming; were this only done, his books should
be regarded as among the best we have on the subject of natural history
in its entirety. The plan of his work is good, his classification
distinguished for its good sense, his dividing lines well marked, his
descriptions sufficiently accurate--monotonous it is true, but
painstaking; the historical part of his work is less good; it is often
confused and fabulous, and the author shows too manifestly the credulous
tendencies of his mind.

"While going over his work, I have been struck with that defect, or
rather excess, which we find in almost all the books of a hundred or a
couple of hundred years ago, and which prevails still among the
Germans--I mean with that quantity of useless erudition with which they
intentionally swell out their works, and the result of which is that
their subject is overlaid with a mass of extraneous matter on which they
enlarge with great complacency, but with no consideration whatever for
their readers. They seem, in fact, to have forgotten what they have to
say in their endeavour to tell us what has been said by other people.

"I picture to myself a man like Aldrovandus, after he has once conceived
the design of writing a complete natural history. I see him in his
library reading, one after the other, ancients, moderns, philo