474 LINNJ3AN CLASSIFICATION OF MAN. CHAP. xxiv. 



Admitting that these schemes are not unphilosophical, as 

 duly recognising the double nature of Man (his moral and 

 intellectual, as well as his physical attributes), Isidore Gr. 

 St. Hilaire observes that little knowledge has been im 

 parted by them. We have gained, he says, much more from 

 those masters of the science who have not attempted any 

 compromise between two distinct orders of ideas, the physical 

 and psychological, and who have confined their attention 

 strictly to Man's physical relation to the lower animals. 



Linnaeus led the way in this field of enquiry by comparing 

 Man and the apes, in the same manner as he compared these 

 last with the carnivores, ruminants, rodents, or any other 

 division of warm-blooded quadrupeds. After several modifi 

 cations of his original scheme, he ended by placing Man as 

 one of the many genera in his order Primates, which 

 embraced not only the apes and lemurs, but the bats also, 

 as he found these last to be nearly allied to some of the 

 lowest forms of the monkeys. But all modern naturalists, who 

 retain the order Primates, agree to exclude from it the bats 

 or cheiroptera ; and most of them class Man as one of several 

 families of the order Primates. In this, as in most systems 

 of classification, the families of modern zoologists and botanists 

 correspond with the genera of Linnseus. 



Blumenbach, in 1779, proposed to deviate from this course, 

 and to separate Man from the apes as an order apart, under 

 the name of Bimana, or two-handed. In making this innova 

 tion he seems at first to have felt that it could not be 

 justified without calling in psychological considerations to his 

 aid, to strengthen those which were purely anatomical ; for, 

 in the earliest edition of his s Manual of Natural History/ 

 he defined Man to be ' animal rationale, loquens, erectum, 

 bimanum,' whereas in later editions he restricted himself 

 entirely to the two last characters, namely, the erect position 

 and the two hands, or 4 animal erectum, bimamun.' 



