76 HISTORY OF PHYSIOLOGY. 



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,' one cause of this ; for that science 

 had made its advances by confining itself to external characters, and 

 rejecting anatomy ; and though Linnaeus acknowledged the depen- 

 dence of zoology upon anatomy 3 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 Pal- 

 las ; who again brought into view the importance of comparative anato- 

 my 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. 



Such is Cuvier's outline of the earlier history of comparative 

 anatomy. We shall not go into detail upon this subject ; but we may 

 observe that such studies had fixed in the minds of naturalists the 

 conviction of the possibility and the propriety of considering large 

 divisions of the animal kingdom as modifications of one common type. 

 Belon, as early as 1555, had placed the skeleton of a man and' a bird 

 side by side, and shown the correspondence of parts. So far as the 

 case of vertebrated animals extends, this correspondence is generally 

 allowed ; although it required some ingenuity to detect its details in 

 some cases ; for instance, to see the analogy of parts between the 

 head of a man and a fish. 



In tracing these less obvious correspondencies, some curious steps 

 have been made in recent times. And here we must, I conceive, 

 ao-ain ascribe no small merit to the same remarkable man who, as we 



O 



have already had to point out, gave so great an impulse to vegetable 

 morphology. Gothe, whose talent and disposition for speculating on 

 all parts of nature were truly admirable, was excited to the study of 

 anatomy by his propinquity to the Duke of Weimar's cabinet of 

 natural history. In 1786, he published a little essay, the object of 

 which was to show that in man, as well as in beasts, the upper jaw 

 tontains an intermaxillary bone, although the sutures are obliterat <.<!. 

 After 1790, 4 animated and impelled by the same passion for natural 



* Cuv. Hist. Sc. Na l . i. 301. 3 Ib. 4 Zur Morphologic, i. <234. 



