OUR BODILY FRAME. 25 



organism. The elaborate science which we now call 

 comparative anatomy was born in the year 1803, 

 when the great French zoologist, Georges Cuvier (a 

 native of Mompelgard, in Alsace), published his 

 profound Legons sur Vanatomie comparee, and endea- 

 voured to formulate, for the first time, definite laws as 

 to the organism of man and the beasts. While his 

 predecessors — among whom was Goethe in 1790 — had 

 mainly contented themselves with comparing the 

 skeleton of man with those of other animals, Cuvier's 

 broader vision took in the whole of the animal 

 organisation. He distinguished therein four great 

 and mutually independent types : Vertebrata, Arti- 

 culata, Mollusca, and Radiata. This advance was of 

 extreme consequence for our " question of all ques- 

 tions," since it clearly brought out the fact that man 

 belonged to the vertebral type, and differed funda- 

 mentally from all the other types. It is true that the 

 keen-sighted Linne had already, in his Sy sterna 

 Nattirce, made a great step in advance by assigning 

 man a definite place in the class of mammals ; he 

 had even drawn up the three groups of half-apes, 

 apes, and men (Lemur, simia, and homo) in the order 

 of primates. But his keen, systematic mind was not 

 furnished with that profound empirical foundation, 

 supplied by comparative anatomy, which Cuvier was 

 the first to attain. Further developments were added 

 by the great comparative anatomists of our own 

 century — Friedrich Meckel (Halle), Johannes Miiller 

 (Berlin), Richard Owen, T. Huxley, and Carl 

 Gegenbaur (Jena, subsequently Heidelberg). The 

 last named, in applying to comparative anatomy the 

 evolutionary theory which Darwin had just established, 

 raised his science to the front rank of biological 



