THE purport of the following pages is an endeavour to reduce the facts belonging to ANIMAL LIFE into claffes, orders, genera, and ſpecies; and, by comparing them with each other, to unravel the theory of diſeaſes. It happened, perhaps unfortunately for the inquirers into the knowledge of diſeaſes, that other ſciences had received improvement previous to their own; whence, inftead of comparing the properties belonging to animated nature with each other, they, idly ingenious, bufied themſelves in attempting to explain the laws of life by thoſe of mechaniſm and chemiſtry; they confidered the body as an hydraulic machine, and the fluids as paffing through a ſeries of chemical changes, forgetting that animation was its effential characteriſtic.

The great CREATOR of all things has infinitely diverfified the works of his hands, but has at the fame time ſtamped a certain fimilitude on the features of nature, that demonftrates to us, that the whole is one family of one parent. On this fimilitude is founded all rational analogy;