Page:Transactions of the Linnean Society of London, Volume 1 (1791).djvu/28

4 regulations of the state, and the softer arts of peace, become more interesting to those who have talents for cultivating them. A part of the community being sufficient to supply the whole with the necessaries of life, the occupations of the rest becoming voluntary, are as various as the virtues and vices, tastes, genius and abilities of mankind; and the more a people are refined and enlightened, the more various and the more distinctly marked are the pursuits of individuals.

The early history of science informs us rather of peculiar acquirements by which certain nations distinguished themselves from the rest, than of the general stock of knowledge then in the world. Thus we are told of the skill of the Egyptians in astronomy, to which they were peculiarly led by their manner of reposing on open terraces under a cloudless sky. But we are not to conclude that this science had never been cultivated by any people before, nor that the Egyptians, and all the rest of the world, had lived totally void of curiosity, and blind to every thing around them, till their attention was excited by the trivial circumstance above mentioned. We learn from the Old Testament, which if it were merely an. human work would be the most venerable monument in the world, that Natural History was very early one of the sciences in the highest estimation. Without examining what was the precise degree of Solomon's skill in this science, the manner in which his botanical knowledge is mentioned in the Bible, proves that to have been in those days the most esteemed perhaps of all learning whatever. Yet where are the records of its progress? How totally is the knowledge of those ages and of numberless others lost to us! As botany and astronomy have been among the earliest pursuits of mankind, so they have been preposterously combined together, and connections frequently imagined between certain stars and particular plants. This is one of those instances, but too numerous in Rh