that the Royal Society "might always wear this Catalogue, as the Miniature of [his] abundant Respects, near their Hearts." As we should expect, this Catalogue is far more discursive than such a work would be if it were drawn up at the present day, though Grew takes credit to himself for not "medling with Mystick, Mythologick, or Hieroglyphick matters." He manages, however, to introduce some general remarks which are of interest. He realises, for instance, that it is possible to group living creatures in a way which has some significance, and that it is the business of the biologist to discover this grouping. He blames Aldrovandus for beginning his history of quadrupeds with the horse, because it is the most useful animal to man, and points out that Gesner's arrangement, which is purely alphabetical, is even less satisfactory. "The very Scale of the Creatures," he concludes, "is a matter of high speculation." It is tempting to quote largely from the Catalogue, but I will confine myself to one other remark of Grew's which is perhaps particularly applicable to-day, when the quotation of authorities is apt to become almost an obsession: "I have made the Quotations," he says, "not to prove things well known, to be true;…as if Aristotle must be brought to prove a Man hath ten Toes."
Grew's last work was the Cosmologia Sacra[1], a folio volume occupied with a defence of Christianity, and an explanation of the author's views on the nature of the Universe. There is a copy in the British Museum, the earlier part of which is crowded with marginal and fly-leaf notes, in some cases initialled or even signed in full by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. One cannot help recalling Charles Lamb's humorous complaint that books lent to Coleridge were apt to be returned "with usury; enriched with annotations tripling their value…in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals." Coleridge seems to have accepted Grew quite seriously as a thinker. In one of his manuscript notes we read, "It is from admiration of Dr N. Grew, and my high estimate of his Powers, that I am almost tempted to say, that the Reasonings in Chapt. III ought to have led him to the perception of the essential phænomenality of Matter." That these reasonings did not so lead him, must,
- ↑ 1701.
