8 LECTURES 



owing to the then limited knowledge of the age, passed 

 everything known to their time in such fields in review. 

 Aristotle was such an one as we have seen, and so like- 

 wise were Pliny the Elder and Galen. Practically it may 

 be said they employed no classification, and they were 

 ignorant alike of the mutual affinities and relation of 

 things, as they were of any rational scheme of the 

 material world. 



At the revival of learning much of this had changed, 

 and notwithstanding men wrote in science with their 

 minds fettered by the works and teachings of their an- 

 cient predecessors, yet a decided step in advance had 

 become evident, inasmuch as men occasionally confined 

 themselves to special departments, such as zoology, anat- 

 omy, botany and the like. Zoologists, as we have seen, 

 however, consulted Aristotle far more often than they did 

 Nature, and anatomists more frequently taught from the 

 pages of Galen than they did from the only safe guide, 

 the human cadaver, upon the dissecting table. All ex- 

 isting forms were supposed to have been created within a 

 comparatively recent time, and no species had materially 

 changed since the date of that creation. Where any 

 notion of the affinities of species of animals inhabiting 

 the earth existed at all, such notions were of the vaguest 

 nature imaginable. Classification, consequently, in their 

 works simply resolved itself into the alphabetical ar- 

 rangement of the forms described. The love of incorpo- 

 rating into works of science descriptions of the marvel- 

 ous and the mythical prevailed almost everywhere. In 

 those times, too, man was studied as one 

 thing and Nature was studied as another, and 

 the two were considered to be antagonistic to each other; 

 indeed, a sort of essential antithesis existed between 

 them, which even in those early days of history gave rise 

 to some puzzling speculations. As crude, however, as 

 was the then knowledge of Nature and the material 

 scheme of things, the foundations, nevertheless, had 

 been lain, and that, too, in very solid masonry, for a 

 more or less systematic gathering of facts. That struc- 

 ture is by no means completed at the present time, not- 

 withstanding the laborers upon it have been increased 

 many, many thousand fold. 



Time passed on and the number of those who were in- 

 terested in the various sciences gradually increased. In 

 1651 Thomas Hobbes wrote: "The register of knowledge 

 of fact is called history. Whereof there be two sorts, 

 one called natural history, which is the history of such 



