We must, however imperfectly, endeavor to trace the application of this idea in the other great department of the world of life; we must follow the history of Animal Morphology.
~Additional material in the [3rd edition].~
CHAPTER VII.
Progress of Animal Morphology.
Sect. 1.—Rise of Comparative Anatomy.
THE most general and constant relations of the form of the organs, both in plants and animals, are the most natural grounds of classification. Hence the first scientific classifications of animals are the first steps in animal morphology. At first, a zoology was constructed by arranging animals, as plants were at first arranged, according to their external parts. But in the course of the researches of the anatomists of the seventeenth century, it was seen that the internal structure of animals offered resemblances and transitions of a far more coherent and philosophical kind, and the Science of Comparative Anatomy rose into favor and importance. Among the main cultivators of this science[91] at the period just mentioned, we find Francis Redi, of Arezzo; Guichard-Joseph Duvernay, who was for sixty years Professor of Anatomy at the Jardin du Roi at Paris, and during this lapse of time had for his pupils almost all the greatest anatomists of the greater part of the eighteenth century; Nehemiah Grew, secretary to the Royal Society of London, whose Anatomy of Plants we have [already] noticed.
[91] Cuv. Leçons sur l’Hist. des Sc. Nat. 414, 420.
But Comparative Anatomy, which had been cultivated with ardor [476] to the end of the seventeenth century, was, in some measure, neglected during the first two-thirds of the eighteenth. The progress of botany was, Cuvier sagaciously suggests,[92] one cause of this; for that science had made its advances by confining itself to external characters, and rejecting anatomy; and though Linnæus acknowledged the dependence of zoology upon anatomy[93] so far as to make the number of teeth his characters, even this was felt, in his method, as a bold step. But his influence was soon opposed by that of Buffon, Daubenton, and Pallas; who again brought into view the importance of comparative anatomy in Zoology; at the same time that Haller proved how much might be learnt from it in Physiology. John Hunter in England, the two Monros in Scotland, Camper in Holland, and Vicq d’Azyr in France, were the first to follow the path thus pointed out. Camper threw the glance of genius on a host of interesting objects, but almost all that he produced was a number of sketches; Vicq d’Azyr, more assiduous, was stopt in the midst of a most brilliant career by a premature death.
[92] Cuv. Hist. Sc. Nat. i. 301.