Old Classifications 37 



it had inspired the colossal achievements of Cuvier, 

 a genius who, under whatever misconceptions he 

 had worked, would have added great!}- to know- 

 ledge. As we have seen in the first chapter, Huxley, 

 through Wharton Jones, and through his own reading, 

 had been brought under the more modern German 

 thought of Johannes Mueller and Von Baer. He 

 had learned to stud}^ the problems of living nature 

 in the spirit of a physicist making investigations into 

 dead nature. In the anatomy of animals, as in the 

 structure of rocks and crystals, there were to be sought 

 out " laws of growth " and shaping and moulding in- 

 fluences which accounted for the form of the structures. 

 To use the technical term, he was a morphologist : one 

 who studied the architecture of animals not merely in 

 a spirit of admiring wonder, but with the definite idea 

 of finding out the guiding principles which had determ- 

 ined these shapes. 



Not only was the prevailing method of investigation 

 faulty, but actual knowledge of a large part of the ani- 

 mal kingdom was extremely limited. In the minds of 

 most zoologists the animal kingdom was divided into 

 two great groups : the vertebrates and invertebrates. 

 The v^ertebrate, or back-boned, animals were well 

 known; comparatively speaking they are all built upon 

 the type of man ; and human anatomists, who indeed 

 made up the greater number of all anatomists, using 

 their exact knowledge of the human body, had studied 

 many other vertebrates with minute care, and, from 

 man to fishes, had arranged living vertebrates very 

 much in the modern order. But the invertebrates 

 were a vague and ill-assorted heap of animals. It was 

 not recognised that among them there were many series 

 of different grades of ascending complexity, and there 



