2 Mr. W.S. Macueay 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 the more 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, naturalists perhaps have little to 
* 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. 
do: 
