ntific works. They are aimed, it is true, against individuals
insignificant enough to elude them, and therefore the larger body, the
nation, is hit and wounded by them. Neither is there any defence open to
us. We send abroad gigantic stories of huge antediluvian lizards,
'larger than the largest size,' and we ourselves are kept upon the stare
at our own wonders from Georgia to Maine, until we find out we have been
exulting over the stranded remains of a common spermaceti whale. At
this present moment, a huge animal dug out of the Big Bone Lick, sixty
feet long, and twenty-five feet high, is parading through the columns of
the European newspapers, after making its progress through our own. This
is, what every naturalist supposed it be, also a great imposition.
Within these few days, drums and trumpets have been sounded for other
monsters. A piece of one of our common coal plants is conjured into a
petrified rattlesnake, and one of the most familiar fossils solemnly
announced all the way from Canada, under a name exploded, and long
forgotten by naturalists. All these gibes and reproaches we ought to
have been spared. There ought to have been the ready means amongst us,
together with the independence and intelligence, to put down these
impostures and puerilities as they arose."

This is well said, and if it be intended to refer to the popular class,
who have not made science a study; to men who make wheelbarrows or sell
cotton and sugar--to the same classes of men, in fact, who in England,
are busied in the daily pursuits by which they earn their bread, leaving
science to scientific men, but respecting its truths, cannot tell "a
hawk from a handsaw"--it is all true enough. But if it be applied to the
power and determination of American mind, professedly, or as in a
private capacity, devoted to the various classes of natural history
spoken of, it is not only unjust in a high degree, but an evidence of
overweening self-complaisance, imprecision of thought, or arrogance. No
trait of the American scientific character has been more uniformly and
highly approbated, by the foreign journals of England, France, and
Germany, than its capacity to accumulate, discriminate, and describe
facts. For fourteen years past _Silliman's Journal of Science_, though
not exclusively devoted to natural sciences, has kept both the
scientific and the popular intelligent mind of the public well and
accurately advised of the state of natural science th