OCTOBEE IS, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



499 



actual eye at the moment, to refute any 

 such correlation as was claimed. Never- 

 theless, notwithstanding the fierce contro- 

 versial literature centered on Huxley, I 

 have never seen an allusion to the lapse. 

 And yet every one will admit that the hog 

 has the "foot cleft" just as any ruminant, 

 but the "form of the teeth"— and the form 

 of some vertebrffi are quite different from 

 those of the ruminants and of course the 

 multiple stomach and adaptation for ru- 

 mination do not exist in the hog. That any 

 one mammalogist should make such a slip 

 is not very surprising, but that a second 

 equally learned should follow in his steps 

 is a singular psychological curiosity. To 

 make the ease clearer to those not well ac- 

 quainted with mammals, I may add that 

 because the feet are cleft in the same man- 

 ner in the hogs as in the ruminants, both 

 groups have long been associated in the 

 same order under the name Paridigitates 

 or Artiodactyles, contrasting with another 

 (comprising the tapirs, rhinocerotids and 

 horses) called Imparidigitates and Perisso- 

 dactyles. 



I need scarcely add that the law of cor- 

 relation applied by Cuvier to the structures 

 of ruminants entirely fails in the case of 

 many extinct mammals discovered since 

 Cuvier 's days. Zadig would have been 

 completely nonplussed if he could have 

 seen the imprint of an Agriochcerid, a 

 Uintatheriid, a Menodontid or a Chalieo- 

 theriid. 



The value of this law was long insisted 

 upon by many. Some of the best anat- 

 omists, as Blainville, protested against its 

 universality, but one who ranked with 

 Cuvier in skill and knowledge of anatomy, 

 Richard Owen, long upheld Cuvier 's view. 

 "You may not be aware," he wrote in 

 1843, "that Mr. DeBlainville contends that 

 the ground— viz., a single bone or articular 

 facet of a bone— on which Cuvier deemed 

 it possible to reconstruct the entire animal, 



is inadequate to that end. ... In this opin- 

 ion I do not coincide."^* The many mis- 

 takes Owen made in attempting to apply 

 the principle proves how well Blainville 's 

 contrary opinion was justified. 



The numberless remains of past animals, 

 rescued from the many formations which 

 the animals themselves distinguished, have 

 entailed constant revisions of systems and 

 clearer comprehension of the development 

 of the animal kingdom. Such revision, too, 

 must continue for many generations yet to 

 come. 



CUVIEE AND ANATOMY 



The failure to suificiently apply anatomy 

 to systematic zoology was especially exem- 

 plified in the treatment of the fishes which 

 absorbed so much of Cuvier 's attention in 

 later years. He, as well as his associate, 

 gave accounts of the visceral anatomy and 

 was led— often misled— to conclusions re- 

 specting relations by his dissections, but he 

 failed to receive enlightenment by exam- 

 ination of the numerous skeletons he had 

 made. Those skeletons, pregnant with sig- 

 nificance for the future, had no meaning 

 for Cuvier ; he never learned how to utilize 

 them for the fishes as he did those of the 

 mammals. His colleague and successor, 

 Valenciennes, in the great "Histoire Nat- 

 urelle des Poissons," was equally unappre- 

 ciative of the importance of comparative 

 osteology for comprehension of the mutual 

 relations of the groups of fishes. 



CUVIEE 'S SUCCESSOES 



The same defect in method or logic that 

 characterized Cuvier 's work was manifest- 

 ed by his great English successor in range 

 of knowledge of comparative anatomy, 

 Richard Owen. His families, for the 

 most part, were the artificial assemblages 

 brought together by zoologists on account 

 of superficial characters and too often 



'' Owen, Am. Journ. 8c. and Arts, XLV., 1843, 

 185. 



