Folio Books: Part of Gosse's Preface

Part of Author's Preface from Gosse's Jamaica

From A Naturalist's Sojourn in Jamaica , 1851

By P. H. Gosse

Natural History is far too much a science of dead things; a necrology. It is mainly conversant with dry skins furred or feathered, blackened, shrivelled, and hay-stuffed; with objects, some admirably beautiful, some hideously ugly, impaled on pins, and arranged on rows in cork drawers; with uncouth forms, disgusting to sight and smell, bleached and shrunken, suspended by threads and immersed in spirit (in defiance of the aphorism, that "he who is born to be hanged will never be drowned") in glass bottles. These distorted things are described; their scales, plates, feathers counted; their forms copied, all shrivelled and stiffened as they are; their colours, changed and modified by death or partial decay, carefully set down; their limbs, members, and organs measured, and the results recorded in thousandths of an inch; two names are given to every one; the whole is enveloped in a mystic cloud of Graeco-Latino-English phraseology (often barbaric enough); -- and this is Natural History!

Of the hundred thousand animals which are considered "known to naturalists," it is probably much within the mark to assert that ninety thousand are "known" only in such sort as is described above.

What should we think if the world were to collect from Egypt the tens of thousands of mummies that are said to be entombed in the mighty catacombs of that country, and having placed them in museums should appoint learned men minutely to measure their differing features and limbs, to describe their appearance with exactitude, and to depict their portraits in all the leathery blackness of their physiognomy; then to give each a name, and record the whole in a book; -- what should we think if the world would call this Egyptian "History"?

It is manifest that there is not an iota of History in either the one or the other. For History is the record of the actions of men, their relations to other men, the circumstances in which they acted, their characters, the influence of their lives upon society, their connexion with the times preceding and following their own, and other points of interest, not one of which could be gathered from a description of their dead and preserved bodies, though ever so exact and minute. So, that alone is worthy to be called Natural History, which investigates and records the condition of living things, of things in a state of nature; of animals, of living animals: -- which tells of their "sayings and doings," their varied notes and utterances, songs and cries; their actions, in ease and under the pressure of circumstances; their affections and passions, towards their young, towards each other, towards other animals, towards man; their various arts and devices, to protect their progeny, to procure food, to escape from their enemies, to defend themselves from attacks; their ingenious resources for concealment; their strategems to overcome their victims; their modes of bringing forth, of feeding, and of training, their offspring; the relations of their structure to their wants and habits; the countries in which they dwell; their connexion with the inanimate world around them, mountain or plain, forest or field, barren heath or bushy dell, open savanna or wild hidden glen, river, lake or sea: -- this would be indeed zoology, i.e. the science of living creatures. And if we have their portraits, let us have them drawn from the life, while the bright eyes are glancing, and the flexible features express the emotions of the mind within, and the hues, so often fleeting and evanescent, exist in their unchanged reality, and the attitudes are full of the elegance and grace that free, wild nature assumes.

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Review of Gosse's Jamaica

Part of Author's Preface from Gosse's Jamaica

By P. H. Gosse