14° EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. 



renouncing such pretensions, was fain to content himself 

 with a method— not for seeing and judging, but for 

 seeing after an orderly fashion. This method ... is 

 still the sole business of our ablest anatomists, but it is 

 not science. It is the road which should lead science- 

 ward, and might perhaps have reached science itself, if 

 instead of walking ever on a single narrow path men had 

 set the anatomy of man and that of animals face to face 

 with one another. For, what real knowledge can be 

 drawn from an isolated pursuit ? Is not the foundation 

 of all science seen to consist in the comparison which 

 the human mind can draw between difiPerent objects in 

 the matter of their resemblances and differences — of 

 their analogous or conflicting properties, and of all the 

 relations in which they stand to one another? The 

 absolute, if it exist at all, is but of the concurrence of 

 man's own knowledge; we judge and can judge of 

 things only by their bearings one upon another ; hence 

 whenever a method limits us to only a single subject, 

 whenever we consider it in its solitude and without 

 regard to its resemblances or to its differences from 

 other objects, we can attain to no real knowledge, nor 

 yet, much less, reach any general principle. We do but 

 give names, and make descriptions of a thing, and of all 

 its parts. Hence comes it that, after three thousand 

 years of dissection, anatomy is still but a nomenclature, 

 and has hardly advanced a step towards its true object, 

 which is the science of animal economy. Furthermore, 

 what defects are there not in the method itself, which 

 should above all things else be simple and easy to be 

 understood, depending as it does upon inspection and 



