Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 9.pdf/13

2 ’Method:

’tie

.. 1

gwtiuldi

vated

men.

the, language

He

Study

of all

therefore,

took,

pains to characterize

of

the animals

in Natural History.

culti

tematic

little

by their efforts.

he

We

al

2..

[.Ianuary,

was but little advanced

Zoology

must come down

to the last cen

tury, to Linnaeus, before we ﬁnd the his tory taken up where Aristotle had left and some of his suggestions carried out with new vigor and vitality. Aristotle

groups,

of different

or lesser groups. His only divisions are genera and species: classes, orders, and them now, families, as we understand

Besides

species and genera,

must

by the word blood he designated only the red ﬂuid circulating in the higher animals; ﬂuid akin to blood exists in whereas all animals, variously colored in some, but colorless in large number of oth however,

that

a

a

remember,

ers. a

After Aristotle, long period elapsed without any addition to the information he left us. Rome and the Middle Ages gave

us nothing,

hardly

and even

Pliny

added

fact to those that Aristotle re

And though the great natural ists of the sixteenth century gave new a

corded.

to this study, their investigations were chieﬂy directed towards minute with the animals they had acquaintance an opportunity of observing, mingled with a

impulse

commentaries

upon

the ancients.

Sys

value.

he gives us

orders and classes,—con._idering classes the most comprehensive, then orders, then He did not, how genera, then species. these groups

represent

distin

as

by

ever,

I

their guished by their nature, but only range; they were still to him, as gencrﬂ and species had been to Aristotle, only larger or smaller groups, not founded up on and limited by different categories of He divided the animal king structure. dom into six classes, which give here, as we shall have occasion

to compare

them

with other classiﬁcations :—.l1un-ma1ia, Birds, Reptiles, (sires, Insects, ll’orms. That this classiﬁcation should have ex pressed all that was known in the last century of the most general relations among animals only shows how dillicult to generalize on such subject; nor

F

should we expect to ﬁnd when we remember

an easy task,

the vast number

of

quarter of million) al species (about Linnaeus ready noticed by naturalists. in ﬁnding com to unite most of his classes; but the Mammalia, that group to which we ourselves belong, re Indeed, in the mained very imperfect. earlier editions of his classiﬁcation, he does not apply the name of Mammalia to succeeded, mon

however,

character

a

ties among animals by the differences be pointed out. He divided the animal kingdom into two groups, which he call ed Enaima and Anaima, or animals with blood and animals without blood. We

to other

and

weight

a

a

stimulated

on general principles, be yet search into the closer aﬂini

names

special

it

classiﬁcation

gave

a

a

a

distinguished those that bring forth living young from those that lay eggs. But system of Nature was not famil though iar even to their great philosopher, and Aristotle had not arrived at the idea of

and

Linnaeus

a

They grouped together quadrupeds also in contradistinction to animals with legs and wings, and they

tives as species.

idea,

only between genera took hold of this

distinguished

and species;

is

are quite

tion of the animal kingdom. Fishes and birds, for instance, they considered as genera, and their different representa

had

it

is

a

is

foreign to the Greek concep

it,

by their cur rent names; and of his descriptions of much their habits and peculiarities, lost upon us from their local character also total ab There and expression. sence of systematic form, of any classiﬁ cation or framework to express the divis ions of the animal kingdom into larger than

to, otherwise

tudes

a

‘

on which

the higher animals characterizing them as the animals with four legs and covered with for or hair, that bring forth living In young and nurse them with milk. thus admitting external features as class this class,

but calls

Quadrupedia,

be excluded many animals which by their mode of reproduction‘ as well as by their respiration and circula

characters,

tion, belong to this class

as much

as

the