336 ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION. 



presents a picture of the essential relations existing among 

 animals more true to nature than the seemingly more cor- 

 rect classifications of recent writers. 



SECTION V. 



PHYSIOPHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS. 



About the time that Cuvier and the French naturalists 

 were tracing the structure of the animal kingdom, and 

 attempting to erect a natural system of Zoology upon this 

 foundation, there arose in Germany a school of philosophy, 

 under the lead of Schelling, which extended its powerful 

 influence to all the departments of physical science. Oken, 

 Kieser, Bojanus, Spix, Huschke, and Carus, are the most 

 eminent naturalists who applied the new philosophy to 

 the study of Zoology. But no one identified his philoso- 

 phical views so completely with his studies in natural 

 history as Oken. 



Now that the current is setting so strongly against 

 everything which recalls the German physiophilosophers 

 and their doings, and it has become fashionable to speak 

 ill of them, it is an imperative duty for the impartial 

 reviewer of the history of science to show how great and 

 how beneficial the influence of Oken has been upon the 

 progress of science in general and of Zoology in particu- 

 lar. It is, moreover, easier, while borrowing his ideas, to 

 sneer at his style and his nomenclature, than to discover 

 the true meaning of what is left unexplained in his mostly 

 paradoxical, sententious, or aphoristical expressions. But 

 the man who has changed the whole method of illustrat- 



O 



ing comparative Osteology ; who has carefully investigated 

 the embryology of the higher animals at a time when few 

 physiologists were paying any attention to the subject; 



