12 Bulletin American Museum of Natural History, [^'ol. XXVII, 



teeth. Xo animal has both tusks and horns; nor has any animal with 

 serrated teeth either of those weapons. The greater part have the front 

 teeth cutting, and those within broad" (Book I, Chap. ii). 



This passage evidently directed the attention of later writers to the 

 importance of the teeth as a means of distinguishing and hence of classi- 

 fying mammals, and we shall see that Wotton, Ray and, later, Linnfeus, 

 Brisson and others were quick to avail themselves of the suggestion. 



£. The Scholastic Epoch. 



Development of the iiistniment.s^ of thought: e. g., Neolatin, logic, the 



concept of genus and species, dichotomous analysis. 

 Reasoning largely deductive. 

 Compounding of mijth and facts. 

 Compounding of science and metaphysics. 

 Reliance on authority and tradition, finally becoming extreme. 



From the time of Aristotle and his classical successors until the rise of 

 scholasticism in the eleventh century, Europe was too much preoccupied 

 with world-wide displacements and readjustments of peoples and of institu- 

 tions to pay particular attention to natural science; and even the Scholastic 

 Epoch in the history of philosophy and science was chiefly occupied with the 

 further development and systematization of the great body of religious and 

 metaphysical doctrines. 



So far as natural history is concerned, it is perhaps rather a further 

 interregnum than an epoch, rather an era or lapse of uneventful time than 

 a time of the slow ascension of some great illuminative idea. The anthro- 

 pocentric idea dominated in natural history as the geocentric idea domi- 

 nated in astronomy; hence a knowledge of the real or supposed properties 

 of animals and particularly of plants was chiefly cultivated in connection 

 with alchemy, magic and materia medica. 



The medieval imagination, full of mysticism, eager for the uncanny 

 and fantastic and teeming with images of ubiquitous devils, flourished on 

 the marvelous tales of a "Sir John Maundeville," and peopled the earth 

 with the monsters which so long survived and ramped in the Terrse Incognitse 

 of world maps. In the schools, citations from authorities were accepted 

 in lieu of proof, and the simple zoology of Aristotle and the scriptures was 

 deeply covered by the accretions of learned exegesis. 



Scholasticism reached its prime as early as the thirteenth century, in the 

 system of the illustrious St. Thomas Aquinas, the "princeps scholasticorum." 

 Afterward, while the renaissance movement was discovering new worlds in 

 all directions, scholasticism in general (but with some brilliant exceptions) 



