among metaphysicians and logicians, denotes a number of beings which agree in certain general properties common to them all, so that a genus is nothing else but an abstract idea, expressed by some general name or term.

Rhetoric. Authors distinguish the art of rhetoric, as also orations or discourses, into three genera or kinds, namely, demonstrative, deliberative, and judicial. To the demonstrative kind belong panegyrics, genethliacs, epithalamiums, and funeral harangues; to the deliberative, persuasions, dissuasions, and commendations; to the judicial, defences and accusations.

Natural History, a subdivision of any class or order of natural beings, whether of the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdoms, which agree in certain common characters.

Music, by the ancients called genus melodic, is a certain manner of dividing and subdividing the principles of melody; that is, the consonant and dissonant intervals, into their concinnous parts. The moderns considering the octave as the most perfect of intervals, and that on which all the concords depend, in the present theory of music the division of that interval is considered as containing the true division of the whole scale. But the ancients went to work somewhat differently. The diatessaron, or fourth, was the least interval which they admitted as concord; and therefore they sought first how that might be most conveniently divided, and then constituted the diapente and dispason. The diatessaron being thus, as it were, the root and foundation of the scale, what they called the genera, or kinds, arose from its various divisions; and hence they defined the genus modulandi the manner of dividing the tetrachord, and disposing its four sounds as to succession. The genera of music were three: the enharmonic, the chromatic, and the diatonic. The first two were variously subdivided; and even with regard to the last, though it is commonly reckoned not to have any species, different authors have proposed different divisions, but without giving any particular names to the species, as was done in the two others.