Abstract
THIS is a little book (200 small 8vo pages) intended, as the preface says, to furnish “short yet comprehensive sketches of some leading naturalists.” The sketches are certainly “short,” but can only be said to be “comprehensive” in the sense that this term may be applied to an epitaph. It is difficult to understand what object such very sketchy biographical sketches can be supposed to serve. Moreover, in this case the subjects appear to have been selected at random; the result being that the portrait gallery, such as it is, presents a somewhat incongruous assemblage—to wit, Linnæus, Lubbock, Thomas Edward, Louis Agassiz, Cuvier, Buffon, Lyell, and Murchison. Whether this curious arrangement is intended to express the writer's idea of the order of merit of these men, or whether, like his choice of naturalists, it is purely haphazard, we are not informed. But surely, if a biographer goes back as far as Linnæus for his material, and carries down his survey to the present generation, even the most popular of popular readers might have expected him to supply a less deficient index of “eminent naturalists.”
Eminent Naturalists.
By Thomas Greenwood (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1886.)
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[Book Reviews]. Nature 36, 293 (1887). https://doi.org/10.1038/036293b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/036293b0