off-hand without intellectual effort, has not progressed since ancient 

 times, and persons who have not made a special study of them are, 

 in this respect, at about the same stage as our ancestors of old. 



Comparative anatomy could but slowly depart from this intui- 

 tive phase. In order to become a true science, it was obliged to 

 wait until another science from which it borrows its materials for 

 study, zootomy, was established. For the latter is a science which 

 does not impose itself upon the attention of man. By reason of its 

 utilitarian character, human anatomy, "anthropotomy," was 

 studied first, by medical men, and zootomy only by chance, for the 

 sake of the aid it was able to furnish to anthropotomy by com- 

 parison of the structure of man with that of animals. On that 

 account zootomy has wrongly been called comparative anatomy, 

 and even in our day some people still consider comparative ana- 

 tomy as being only the anatomy of animals compared with that 

 of man; they confound it with zootomy, which conception is most 

 inaccurate. 



True comparative anatomy has for its first object the presenta- 

 tion in another grouping of the facts of zootomy and the. comparison 

 of them among themselves. 



Zootomy describes the arrangement and structure of all the 

 organs in each animal, and passes in review successively all animals; 

 it gives a complete and concrete picture of the organization of each 

 one. Comparative anatomy studies in all animals successively the 

 position and structure of a given organ, and proceeds thus success- 

 ively with all the organs; it gives a complete but abstract picture 

 of the constitution of each one throughout the animal kingdom. 

 It is, therefore, not creative; it only points out from another point 

 of view the facts which zootomy has already made known. In that 

 sense it is not, properly speaking, a science. It is not, however, 

 less useful, and one is wrong to slight it on the pretext that it has 

 not an independent personality in the general tableau of the sciences. 

 It enlarges the views of the anatomists, determines a multitude of 

 ideas, points out new aspects of things. It is the necessary comple- 

 ment of zootomy, and no one may be a perfect anatomist, if, after 

 having studied zootomy, he does not review from the standpoint 

 of comparative anatomy the ideas acquired in that study in order 

 to study them anew. 



This first object of comparative anatomy is not considered by 

 anatomists as the most important, or as that to which this science 

 owes the high dignity with which they invest it. It pursues another 

 aim more elevated and more difficult to attain, but also more merit- 

 orious: the discovery of general laws which may be deduced from 

 the comparative study of the structure of animals. There com- 

 parative anatomy is creative, for zootomy alone could not pretend 



