CHAPTER VII 
CUVIER AND THE RISE OF COMPARATIVE 
ANATOMY 
AFTER observers like Linnzeus and his followers had at- 
tained a knowledge of the externals, it was natural that men 
should turn their attention to the organization or internal 
structure of living beings, and when the latter kind of inves- 
tigation became broadly comparative, it blossomed into com- 
parative anatomy. The materials out of which the science 
of comparative anatomy was constructed had been long 
accumulating before the advent of Cuvier, but the mass of 
details had not been organized into a compact science. 
As indicated in previous chapters, there had been an in- 
creasing number of studies upon the structure of organisms, 
both plant and animal, and there had resulted some note- 
worthy monographs. All this work, however, was mainly 
descriptive, and not comparative. Now and then, the com- 
paring tendency had been shown in isolated writings such as 
those of Harvey, Maipighi, and others. As early as 1555, 
Belon had comparcd the skeleton of the bird with that of the 
human body ‘‘in the same posture and as nearly as possible 
bone for bone’’; but this was merely a faint foreshadowing 
of what was to be done later in comparing the systems of the 
more important organs. 
We must keep in mind that the study of anatomy em- 
braces not merely the bony framework of animals, but also 
the muscles, the nervous system, the sense organs, and all the 
other structures of both animals and plants. In the rise of 
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