2 Mr. W. S. Macleay on the Comparative Anatomy 



dently of its pathological or medical relation to the human 

 frame, has these two most important objects ; namely, either 

 the ascertainment of the variations of a general plan of struc- 

 ture with reference to the particular exigencies of the species to 

 which such variations are applied, or the study of the variations 

 of general plans of structure with reference to the great plan of 

 creation. English writers on comparative anatomy have rarely 

 looked beyond the first of these objects ; and yet the last is not 

 only themore important of the two, but involves in it the former 

 as a minor consideration or mean by which we may arrive at its 

 attainment. And thus we find, that an anatomist may labo- 

 riously investigate the structure and use of an organ, without 

 having the least idea of ascertaining the place held in nature by 

 the animal to which this organ belongs : but no zoologist can 

 be satisfied that he has ascertained the place of an animal in 

 nature, without fully investigating the structure and use of its 

 various organs ; since on this structure and on this use depends 

 all his knowledge of its place. It is therefore to be regretted, 

 that in England the arrangement, or consequence, is so often 

 separated from the facts from which that consequence is, or 

 ought to be drawn ; that, in short, while in one place we see 

 the zoological consequence without the facts from which it has 

 been deduced ; in another we observe the bare statement of ana- 

 tomical facts, without the great consequences to which these 

 lead, and indeed too often without any view beyond the possible 

 use of the various organs to the particular animals dissected*. 



With comparative anatomy, as it may tend to elucidate human 

 pathology or medical science, natui'alists perhaps have little to 

 orv iff!" =)■)-)■> VRfff i??i ,ffoHt:'??^r?f?fTo '^'"f'^fvifwffo-'^ ^o ^ 



* Such works indeed as Paley's Natural Theology, — a book most valuable not for 

 its physiological facts, but for its mode of reasoning upon them, — have another object ; 

 to wit, the proof of the existence of design in particular structures by the tracing of 

 effects to their respective causes. 



' wifciii^ ,. CIO '. 



