LECTURE VI. 



ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF ANIMALS. 



THE SUBDIVISIONS OF THE MAMMALIA LARGER THAN 



ORDERS. 



In my last lecture I endeavoured to point out the grounds upon 

 which naturalists have arrived at the conclusion that the classes 

 of the Animal Kingdom may be arranged together in larger 

 groups or divisions, such as have been termed "provinces " and 

 " sub-kingdoms." If the time at my disposal for the considera- 

 tion of Classification permitted me to do so, I should now, in 

 the logical order of my discourse, take the opposite course ; and 

 turning again to the list of classes, I should endeavour to indi- 

 cate in what manner they must be subdivided into sub-classes, 

 orders, and lesser divisions. But it is needless to sav that such 

 a task as this would require many lectures, while I have only 

 one to dispose of; and I propose to devote that one to a con- 

 sideration of the classification of that class, which is in many 

 respects the most interesting and the most important of any in 

 the Animal Kingdom, — the class Mammalia. 



A great many systems of classification of the Mammalia have 

 been proposed, but, as any one may imagine from the nature of 

 the case, only those which have been published within the last 

 forty or fifty years, or since our knowledge of the anatomy of 

 these animals has approached completeness, have now any 

 scientific standing-ground. I do not propose to go into the 

 history of those older systems, which laboured more or less 

 under the disqualification of being based upon imperfect know- 



