Vill PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 
ciples of that ingenious methodist, and who, wherever he 
found any disorder, seems to have tried to render it more in- 
extricable. 
It is also true, that there were very extensive works upon 
particular classes, which had made known a great number of 
new species; but their authors merely considered the exter- 
nal relations of those species, and no one had employed him- 
self in arranging the classes and orders from the ensemble of 
the structure; the characters of several classes remained false 
or incomplete even in justly celebrated works of anatomy ; 
some of the orders were arbitrary, and in scarcely any of these 
divisions were the genera placed conformably to nature. 
I was compelled then, and the task occupied a considerable 
period of time, I was compelled to make anatomy and zoology, 
dissection and classification, the pioneers of my steps ; to search 
for better principles of distribution in my first remarks on or- 
ganization—to employ them in order to arrive at new ones, | 
and to render the distribution perfect—in fine, from this mu- 
tual reaction of the two sciences, to elicit a system of zoology 
that might serve as an introduction and a guide in anatomical 
investigations, and as a body of anatomical doctrine fitted to 
develope and explain the zoological system. 
The first results of this double labour appeared in 1795 in 
a special memoir upon a new division of the white blooded 
animals. A sketch of their application to genera and to their 
division in subgenera was the object of my elementary ‘‘’Ta- 
bleau Elémentaire des Animaux,” printed in 1798, which, in 
conjunction with M. Dumeril, I improved, in the tables an- 
nexed to the first volumes of my ‘¢Lecons d’Anatomie Com- 
parée” in 1800. 
T should, perhaps, have contented myself with perfecting 
these tables, and proceeded immediately to the publication of 
my great work on anatomy, if, in the course of my researches, 
1 had not been frequently struck with another defect of the 
greater number of the general or partial systems of zoology; I 
mean the confusion in which the want of critical acumen has 
left a great number of species, and even several genera. 
