One must conceive a very useless tree, without fruit
and almost without leaves, incapable of giving nourishment or shelter,
but with a good heart.
Such was Cousin Benedict. He would very willingly render service to
people if, as Mr. Prudhomme would say, he were capable of rendering it.
Finally, his friends loved him for his very feebleness. Mrs. Weldon
regarded him as her child--a large elder brother of her little Jack.
It is proper to add here that Cousin Benedict was, meanwhile, neither
idle nor unoccupied. On the contrary, he was a worker. His only
passion--natural history--absorbed him entirely.
To say "Natural History" is to say a great deal.
We know that the different parts of which this science is composed are
zoology, botany, mineralogy, and geology.
Now Cousin Benedict was, in no sense, a botanist, nor a mineralogist,
nor a geologist.
Was he, then, a zoologist in the entire acceptation of the word, a kind
of Cuvier of the New World, decomposing an animal by analysis, or
putting it together again by synthesis, one of those profound
connoisseurs, versed in the study of the four types to which modern
science refers all animal existence, vertebrates, mollusks,
articulates, and radiates? Of these four divisions, had the artless but
studious savant observed the different classes, and sought the orders,
the families, the tribes, the genera, the species, and the varieties
which distinguish them?
No.
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