Page:Jardine Naturalist's Library Foreign Butterflies.djvu/56

54 skin; the form symmetrical, the parts arranged in pairs. The intelligent animals, forming the third grand division, feel, and acquire ideas capable of being preserved, and execute operations between these ideas which furnish them with others; and they are intelligent in different degrees. They possess a vertebral column, a brain and spinal marrow; distinct senses; organs of motion fixed to an interior skeleton, and symmetrical forms, the parts being placed in pairs.

This general distribution of animals has not been very much approved of by naturalists; and Cuvier asserts that it is neither founded on their organization, nor an exact observation of their faculties. The degree of intelligence observed in the different classes, would certainly lead most observers to give a very different position to several, from that which they have obtained in the above scale. The insecta and arachnides, for example, which are made to occupy the lowest place among the sentient races, are undoubtedly entitled to the rank assigned to the mollusca and cirrhipedes; for there can be no comparison in this respect between a hive-bee or an ant, and an imperfectly organized and almost inanimate mollusc.

At a subsequent period, in consequence of some new discoveries made by M. M. Savigny, Leseur, and Desmarets, he separated certain tribes from the polypi, and formed them into a distinct class under the name of ascidiens. Some new views likewise