144 h'ANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



t he highest and most complex in structure, or to begin with the latter, and from 

 thence descend to the consideration of the lowest kinds of animated beings. Dr. 

 Mivart gives the preference to the last-named course, and deviating in its execu- 

 tion from the historical practice of beginning the study of animals and plants with 

 man, as the type of the highest class, for various reasons, which he states with 

 great cogency, has preferred to select for examination and comparison some other 

 animal, easily obtained, of convenient size, belonging to man's class— that of 

 mammals — and not so different from him in the structure of its limbs and other 

 large portions of its frame but that analogies between it and him may readily 

 suggest themselves. He has selected the common cat as most fully satisfying 

 these conditions, and in an exhaustive treatise, which he entides "The Cat," and 

 which he intends as an introduction to the natural history of the entire group of 

 backboned animals, as well as to zoology generally and to biology, he presents 

 the results of his elaborate study of the zoology of the cat, treating the subject so 

 as to give the student of biology such a knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and 

 the kindred sciences as may enable him to study profitably the whole class to 

 which it belongs. 



Concluding that the study of the anatomy and physiology of the cat 

 might be best pursued by investigating the function of each organ and set 

 of organs, and their structure, in the performance of his task Dr. Mivart has 

 treated of these in successive chapters, in the following order: the skeleton, the 

 muscles, the organs of alimentation, of circulation, of respiration and secretion, 

 of generation and reproduction, the nervous system and the organs of sense, the 

 development of the body, and psychology. Having thus disposed of the facts 

 of structure and formation, he then proceeds to consider the various affinities of 

 the cat to other animals (in this chapter including a full and interesting account of 

 all the different kinds of cat, wild and domesticated), and its relations to space 

 and time, or, in other words, its place in nature. In following out this plan, Dr. 

 Mivart treats elaborately upon the anatomy, physiology, psychology, taxonomy, 

 and hexicology of the cat, unfolding the processes of individual development, or the 

 series of changes gone through by each individual of the cat species in reaching 

 maturity 5 and in a concluding chapter he considers the development of the 

 species, and gives his conclusions as to the pedigree and origin, both of the cat 

 considered as a species and of the whole family of Felidae. In arriving at his 

 conclusions on this head he rejects as a crude and inadequate conception the 

 theory that the origin of species is due to natural selection, and maintains that the 

 genesis of new species is due mainly to an internal cause, which may be stimulat- 

 ed or aided, or may be more or less restricted, by the action of surrounding con- 

 ditions; that all our knowledge being derived from experience, we can only judge 

 (apart from revelation) of things as they have been by things as they are; that as 

 every animal is now the product of a parent organism more or less like it, so any 

 antecedent animal also was the product of a parent organism more or less like it; 

 that we do daily see the origin of concrete embodiments of ideas which are not 



