Excerpt from Illustrated Natural History

The true object of Zoology is not, as some appear to fancy, to arrange, to number, and to ticket animals in a formal inventory, but to make the study an inquiry into the Life-nature, and not only an investigation of the lifeless organism. I must not, how ever, be understood to disparage the outward form, thing of clay though it be. For what wondrous clay it is, and how marvellous the continuous miracle by which the dust of earth is transmuted into the glowing colors and graceful forms which we most imperfectly endeavor to preserve after the soul has departed therefrom. It is a great thing to be acquainted with the material framework of any creature, but it is a far greater to know something of the principle which gave animation to that structure. The former, indeed, is the consequence of the latter. The lion, for example, is not predacious because it possesses fangs, talons, strength, and activity; on the con trary, it possesses these qualities because its inmost nature is predacious, and it needs these appliances to enable it to carry out the innate principle of its being; so that the truest description of the lion is that which treats of the animating Spirit, and not only of the outward form. In accordance with this principle, it has been my endeavor to make the work rather anecdotal and vital than merely anatomical and scientific. The object of a true zoologist is to search into the essential nature of every being, to investigate, according to his individual capacity, the reason why it should have been placed on earth, and to give his personal service to his Divine Master in developing that nature in the best manner and to the fullest extent.

What do we know of Man from the dissecting room? Of Man, the warrior, the statesman, the poet, or the saint? In the lifeless corpse there are no records of the burning thoughts, the hopes, loves, and fears that once animated that now passive form, and which constituted the very essence of the being. Every nerve, fibre, and particle in the dead bodies of the king and the beggar, the poet and the boor, the saint and the sensualist, may be separately traced, and anatomically they shall all be alike, for neither of the individuals is there, and on the dissecting table lies only the cast-off attire that the spirit no longer needs. What can an artist learn even of the outward form of Man, if he lives only in the dissecting room, and studies the human frame merely through the medium of scalpel and scissors? He may, indeed, obtain an accurate muscular outline, but it will be an outline of a cold and rigid corpse, suggestive only of the charnel house, and devoid of the soft and rounded form, the delicate tinting, and breathing grace which invest the living human frame. A feeling eye will always discover whether an artist has painted even his details of attire from a lay figure instead of depicting the raiment as it rests upon and droops from the breathing form of a living model for such robes are not raiment, but a shroud. So it is with the animal kingdom. The zoologist will never comprehend the nature of any creature by the most careful investigation of its interior structure or the closest inspection of its stuffed skin, for the material structure tells little of the vital nature, and the stuffed skin is but the lay figure stifily fitted with its own cast coat.

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