268 ON THE CLASSES OF THE 



neither his cupidity nor his vanity can be gratified, nei- 

 ther his fears quelled, nor his pride elated by the research, 

 he is sure to throw contempt, if not obloquy, on the 

 science. No better example of this truth can be given 

 than the progress of natural histoiy since the period when 

 it, with all other branches of human knowledge, revived 

 from the deathlike state in which they were plunged during 

 the dark ages. It was unquestionably to its evident utility 

 in a chirurgical point of view, that anatomy, for the second 

 time, owed its origin; and when a few men, struck with 

 the wonders it displayed, extended the pursuit beyond 

 what suited the ideas of a barbarous age, ecclesiastical 

 censure, and all the violence of a bigotry which was in- 

 capable of looking beyond the province of medicine, pro- 

 hibited the dissection of the human subject, as the most 

 horrible of impieties. Curiosity was however excited, 

 and this impetus once given necessarily produced its effect; 

 so that while human anatomy was taught in public, by the 

 dissection of quadrupeds, it was often learned in private on 

 the human body. That rational beings should not institute 

 comparisons, and note the differences, between the various 

 specimens of mechanism thus placed daily before them, was 

 evidently impossible; and comparative anatomy, in this 

 manner, arose less from any desire to be acquainted with 

 the works of the Deity, than, in the first case, from a be- 

 nevolent wish to relieve the sufferings of a fellow creature, 

 and, in the second, from a mixed emotion of pride and cu- 

 riosity to know in what respects the human structure is 

 superior to that of other animals. The Mammalia, how- 

 ever, could not long be examined without the anatomist 

 having his ideas of the corporeal perfection of man, and 

 all the fabric of vanity which was built on such ideas. 



