474 LINN^AN CLASSIFICATION OF MAN. chap. xxiv. 



Admitting that these schemes are not unphilosophical, as 

 duly recognizing the double nature of Man (his moral and 

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

 St. Ililaire observes that little knowledge has been imparted 

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

 masters of the science who have not attempted any compro- 

 mise 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 inquiry 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 em- 

 braced not only the apes and lemurs, but the bats also, as he 

 found these last to be nearly allied to some of the lowest 

 ibrms of the monkeys. But all modern naturalists, who re- 

 tain 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 botan- 

 ists corret^pond with the genera of Linnaeus. 



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 inno- 

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

 justified without calling in ps^'chological considerations to his 

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

 in the earliest edition of his " Manual of Natural History," 

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

 bimanum," whereas in later editions he restricted him- 

 self entirely to the two last characters, namely, the erect posi- 

 tion and the two hands, or " animal erectum, bimanum." 



