Zoology as Related to Evolution. 207 



tree-like structure, having four distinct 'branches Mollusk, 

 Radiate, Articulate, and Vertebrate an immense gain. He 

 was the first zoologist to enter the great nature-built mu- 

 seum of the rocks and recognize the exceeding value of its 

 fossil treasures as the antecedents of living forms ; and his 

 skill as a comparative anatomist is indicated by the fact that 

 while his predecessors had mistaken the bones of creatures 

 as wide apart as the elephant and the salamander for those 

 of men, he out of a single tooth could reconstruct the whole 

 body of an animal otherwise unknown. 



It was under him that zoology reached the maturity of 

 its second great form, that of organised knowledge, Xatural 

 History ; and who can compare it with what it was to begin 

 with, a mere unassorted collection of strange stories about 

 animals, and not see that it was as much a transmutation of 

 species as any that the primitive amoeba ever underwent in 

 mounting up from its original protoplasm to be an organized 

 mammal? 



Side by side with this process of classification, however, 

 another one still more striking had already begun that of 

 asking what was the origin and cause of classes, and of try- 

 ing to get at the laws and forces by which they had natu- 

 rally come. As far back as the time of Linnaeus not to go 

 back to that of Hippocrates and Lucretius Buff on (1707- 

 1788) had given the question birth. He is usually ridiculed 

 as a dreamer rather than a scientist, a man who in studying 

 ftnimala vivisected them unopened with his imagination as a 

 scalpel, and arranged them unpunctured with his philosophy 

 as a pin ; and indeed as a dealer with facts he is not for a 

 moment to be compared with Linnaeus and Cuvier. But he 

 got hold in his dreaming of some things in nature that they 

 with their eyes wide open for facts were utterly blind to ; he 

 was a babe in zoology as compared with them, but, like the 

 primitive anthropoid, the babe of a new species. He 

 reached forward in fancy to almost the exact thing that 

 Darwin later found in fact, expressing it, however, as he had 

 to, in the subjunctive mood of church fear rather than with 

 the indicative of scientific manhood. "If," he says, "we 

 did not know the contrary to be the case by sure warrant, 

 we might easily have concluded, so fallible is our reason, 

 that animals always varied slightly, and that such variations, 

 indefinitely accumulated, suffice to account for almost any 

 amount of ultimate difference" words that for delicate in- 

 genuity in hinting a truth so as not to hurt a prejudice, 



