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Excerpt from A Manual of Natural History: Being a Companion to the Series of Pictorial, Diagrams Natural Specimens, Illustrative of Human Physiology, Zoology, Botany, Geology, and Mineralogy If the study of the Sciences is so much neglected in England at present it is certainly not for the want of illustrious professors. Nevertheless, the great majority of all classes are scarcely acquainted with even the rudiments of these branches of knowledge, because the primary instruction of children does not include any of these very useful sciences, which would be a real amusement to them, and which are of such numerous and frequent application in the arts, industry, agriculture, commerce, and, in short, the ordinary business of life. What is to be done to remedy this state of things? We must inspire and develop a taste for the sciences from infancy, and for this purpose must select one of the simplest and most attractive practical sciences, which is also of very frequent application. Natural History will certainly answer our purpose best. In truth, the peculiar attraction which natural history possesses for children is so striking, that most writers of elementary books try to make them interesting to the scholars by giving pictures and descriptions of animals. Unfortunately, these pictures are often bad, and represent the rat of the same size as the lion, and thus tend to mislead the notions of children; and the descriptions are generally no better than the pictures in this respect. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.