SCIENCE IN THE LAST HALF CENTURY. 03 



important group of living animals and plants, no less than the fossil 

 relics of former fauute and flone. An enormous addition has thus been 

 made to our knowledge, especially of the lower forms of life, and it may 

 ibe said that morphology, however inexhaustible in detail, is complete in 

 its broad features. Classification, which is merely a convenient sum- 

 mary expression of morphological facts, has undergone a corresponding 

 improvement. The breaks which formerly separated our groups from 

 one another, as animals from plants, vertebrates from invertebrates, 

 cryptogams from phanerogams, have either been tilled up or shown 

 to have no theoretical significance. The question of the position of 

 man, as an animal, has given rise to much disputation, with the result 

 of proving that there is no anatomical or developmental character by 

 which he is more widely distinguished from the groui) of animals most 

 nearly allied to him, than they are from one another. In fact, in this 

 particular, the classification of Linnaeus has been proved to be more ia 

 accordance with the facts than those of most of his successors. 



ANTHROPOLOGY. 



The study of man, as a genus and species of the animal world, con- 

 ducted with reference to no other considerations than those which 

 would be admitted by the investigator of any other form of animal 

 life, has given rise to a special branch of biology known as Anthropol- 

 ogy, which has grown with great rapitlity. Numerous societies devoted 

 to this portion of science have sprung up, and the energy of its devo- 

 tees has produced a copious literature. The physical characters of the 

 various races of men have been studied with a minuteness and accu- 

 racy heretofore unknown ; and demonstrative evidence of the existence 

 of human contemporaries of the extinct animals of the latest geological 

 epoch has been obtained; physical science has thus been brought into 

 the closest relation with history and with archaeology ; and the striking 

 investigations which, during our time, have put beyond doubt the vast 

 antiquity of Babylonian and Egyptian civilization, are in perfect har- 

 mony with the conclusions of anthropology as to the antiquity of the 

 human species. 



Classification is a logical process which consists in putting together 

 those things which are like and keeping asunder those which are un- 

 like; and a morphological classification, of course, takes notes only of 

 morphological likeness and unlikeness. So long, therefore, as our mor- 

 l)hological knowledge was almost wholly confined to ana^omy, the 

 characters of groups were solely anatomical ; but as the phenomena of 

 embryology were explored, the likeness and unlikeness of individual 

 development had to betaken into account ; and at present, the study of 

 ancestral evolution introduces a new element of likeness and unlike- 

 ness which is not only eminently deserving of recognition, but must 

 ultimately predominate over all others. A classification which shall 

 represent the process of ancestral evolution is, in fact, the end which 



