THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



In the course of those studies of comparative anato- 

 my which led to his new classification, Cuvier's atten- 

 tion was called constantly to the peculiar co-ordination 

 of parts in each individual organism. Thus an animal 

 with sharp talons for catching living prey as a member 

 of the cat tribe has also sharp teeth, adapted for tear- 

 ing up the flesh of its victim, and a particular type of 

 stomach, quite different from that of herbivorous creat- 

 ures. This adaptation of all the parts of the animal to 

 one another extends to the most diverse parts of the or- 

 ganism, and enables the skilled anatomist, from the ob- 

 servation of a single typical part, to draw inferences as 

 to the structure of the entire animal a fact which was 

 of vast aid to Cuvier in his studies of paleontology. It 

 did not enable Cuvier, nor does it enable any one else, 

 to reconstruct fully the extinct animal from observation 

 of a single bone, as has sometimes been asserted, but 

 what it really does establish, in the hands of an expert, 

 is sufficiently astonishing. 



Of course this entire principle, in its broad outlines, is 

 something with which every student of anatomy had 

 been familiar from the time when anatomy was first 

 studied, but the full expression of the " law of co-ordina- 

 tion," as Cuvier called it, had never been explicitly made 

 before; and notwithstanding its seeming obviousness, the 

 exposition which Cuvier made of it in the introduction 

 to his classical work on comparative anatomy, which 

 was published during the first decade of the century, 

 ranks as a great discovery. It is one of those general- 

 izations which serve as guide-posts to other discover- 

 ries. 



Much the same thing may be said of another general- 

 ization regarding the animal body, which the brilliant 



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