Chap. III. PHYSIOPHILOSOPIIICAL SYSTEMS. 211 



more great plans, limited in this or any other way, is not a question of piin- 

 ciple, but one involving only accuracy and penetration in the investigation ; and 

 I maintain that the first sketch of Cuvier, with all its imperfections of details, pre- 

 sents a picture of the essential relations existing among animals truer to nature 

 than the seemingly more correct classifications of recent writers. 



SECTION Y. 



rHYSIOPHILOSOPHICAL 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 j^owerful influence to all the departments of physical 

 science. Oken, Kieser, Bojanus, Spix, Huschke, and Carus are the most eminent 

 naturahsts who applied the new philosophy to the study of Zoology. But no 

 one identified his philosophical views so completely with his studies in natural 

 history as Oken. 



Now that the current is setting so strongly against every thing 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 particular. 

 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 illustrating 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, who has classified the tliree 

 kingdoms of nature upon principles wholly his own, who has perceived thousands 

 of homologies and analogies among organized beings entirely overlooked before, who 

 has published an extensive treatise of natural history containing a condensed account 

 of all that Avas known at the time of its publication, who has conducted for twenty- 

 five years the most extensive and most complete periodical review of the natural 

 sciences ever published, in which every discoverj'^ made during a quarter of a 

 century is fiiithfully recorded, the man who inspired every student with an ardent 

 love for science, and with admiration for his teacher, — that man will lun-er be 

 forgotten, nor can the services he has rendered to science be overlooked, so long 

 as thinking is connected with investigation. 



