NATURAL HISTORY IN ANECDOTE. |

INTRODUCTION.

Science. Science is classified truth. Menstudy the heavenly
bodies, note their characteristics, observe their movements, and
define their relationships; and having verified their deduc-
tions by repeated experiments, arrange the truths they have
discovered into systems, and by classifying their knowledge
reduce it to a science: this science they call Astronomy.
Astronomy is thus the classified arrangement of all known
truths concerning the heavenly bodies. Geology, similarly, is
the classified arrangement of all known truths concerning the
material structure of the Earth.
The Kingdoms The Natural World has been variously divided

of Nature. for the purposes of study. Linnzeus divided
it into three kingdoms; (I) the Mineral kingdom (II) the
Vegetable kingdom and (III) the Animal kingdom, thus
naming the three kingdoms in the order of their natural
geneses. The Mineral kingdom comprises the snorganic forms
of nature,—those which have no organism and which can
only increase by external addition. The Vegetable and
Animal kingdoms comprise the organic life of nature,—those
forms which are provided with means for promoting their
own development and propagating species. The Vegetable
kingdom, while easily distinguishable from the Mineral
kingdom is in some of its forms so similar to the lower
forms of animal life as to suggest relationship between the.
two; while the Animal kingdom, beginning with the lower
forms which approximate so closely to vegetable forms,

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