Lefevre — The Advance of Zoology in the Nineteenth Century. 77 



utterly lost sight of by Linnaeus and his followers, and inter- 

 est in anatomy, physiology and embryology lagged far be- 

 hind. The narrow and false aim thus established in large 

 measure dominated the study of zoology for many years after- 

 wards and resulted in a dry, spiritless investigation which dur- 

 ing the first half of the nineteenth century had brought zool- 

 ogy into much disrepute among thinking men. 



Widespread as was the influence of the species-maker dur- 

 ing the latter part of the eighteenth century and first half of 

 the nineteenth, he nevertheless did not hold an undisputed 

 field. Although it was not until the dawn of the Darwinian 

 Era that his doom was finally sealed, there had been many 

 voices lifted in protest against the purely empirical method of 

 the systematists, and there soon arose in revolt against the 

 Linnaean School a large number of philosophical zoologists 

 who endeavored to bring order into the chaos of the vast 

 amount of accumulated raw material. There thus sprang up 

 over Europe the so-called nature-philosophers, most notably 

 and ably represented by Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, Oken, 

 Goethe, Treviranus and Geoffroy St. Hilaire. I shall have 

 occasion later to speak of these men in considering the develop- 

 ment of the evolutionary idea, as their philosophical specula- 

 tions were largely concerned with the transmutation of 

 species. But great as was the service rendered by them and 

 others in establishing a broader, philosophical spirit and in 

 attempting to discover underlying general principles of 

 zoology, their speculations frequently led them into serious 

 error. Just as the pendulum had swung to one extreme with 

 Linnaeus and his followers on the empirical side, it reached 

 in the school of nature-philosophers the opposite limit in 

 their uncontrolled speculations. From the time of Linnaeus, 

 a general survey of zoological science shows us a continual 

 vacillation between these two tendencies, the empirical on the 

 one hand and the speculative on the other. Now, as opposed 

 to the many errors of the nature-philosophers, the great 

 French naturalist, Cuvier, brought the pendulum back to the 

 empirical method by re-establishing, extending and developing 

 the study of comparative anatomy, an empirical method, 

 however, which was far sounder and more valuable than that 



