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On the PossihUity of Elucidating' the Natural History of Man 

 by the Study of the Domestic Animals. By M. Isidoue Geof- 

 FRAY Saint Hilaire. 



Of all the different branches of Zoology, without doubt the 

 most interesting to man is the natural history of man himself. 

 Hence the unceasing, and we may add, ever-increasing zeal 

 which travellers, naturalists, and medical men of every epoch 

 and clime have bestowed in accumulating a multitude of facts 

 and observations, and hence the fresh additions which are daily 

 making to the mighty store. Were the perfection of any science 

 to be estimated by the number of facts it had amassed, no doubt 

 could remain that anthropology would be one of the most ad- 

 vanced of all ; but if, on the other hand, less importance is 

 to be attached to the mere number of the observations than to 

 their scientific value, if, in short, facts are to be weighed rather 

 than counted, then we shall be forced to adopt a very different 

 conclusion, and must even avow that there are few branches of 

 Zoology which have not made more marked and decided pro- 

 gress than the natural history of man. 



This may, perhaps, be regarded as a singular and parodoxical 

 circumstance, and in fact a great anomaly in the history of the 

 science, but it is nevertheless an incontestible truth, of which the 

 proofs are only too numerous. Observations which, generally 

 speaking, are very imperfect, ill arranged, and but slightly asso- 

 ciated, and yielding only uncertain results ; or, in other words, 

 materials which may become useful for the future, but which 

 now are scarcely even the elements of an established science, arc 

 the only products which can be derived, according to accurate 

 criticism, from the treatises concerning man which have been 

 published up to the present time. It is also true that although 

 zoologists have succeeded in establishing among the innumer- 

 able beings which are the objects of their study, divisions of all 

 sorts, which, for the most part, are accurately characterised, and 

 happily linked together, and have thus almost succeeded in es- 

 tablishing a classification for the whole animal kingdom, which 

 is at once natural and logical, they have not yet succeeded in 

 determining with any degree of precision the several types pre- 



