and future Prospects. 5 175 



bar was silent in his presence ; the church looked on but said nothing, 

 biding, as usual, "its time;" smaller wits saw the propriety of exer- 

 cising their pens on more assailable topics ; Voltaire himself, had he 

 been alive, must have yielded his assent to the truth of Cuvier's de- 

 monstration. But, now that Cuviei? and the last of the anatomical 

 school of France, DeBlainville, are dead, symptoms of a renaissance 

 appear, claiming for certain great men, long forgotten, becoming 

 niches in the Temple of Fame. The chief of these forgotten illus- 

 trious is BufFon. Out of the combined labours of the Linnean and 

 Cuviei ian eras it is proposed to form a phase distinct from yet not at 

 variance with the hypotheses and views of the illustrious Frenchman. 

 Hopeless as to forming an era, the modern zoologist would yet fain 

 retain his favourite study amongst the living sciences ; he beseeches 

 you not to send it back to the anecdotic and amusing literature of the 

 past.* The history of the dead and extinct zoological world, wonder- 

 ful though it be, he perceives to be scarcely sufficient to enable it to 

 stand its ground, the living and actually existing world being that 

 alone which interests men. Little avails it to the present generation 

 to be told what kinds of bears and hippopotami, saurians and other 

 reptiles, if they were reptiles, inhabited aland, to call which ancient 

 Britain must unquestionably be erroneous in every sense of the term. 

 An attempt, accordingly, is being made to connect Zoology with the 

 useful and industrial arts,— to hand it over to Boards of Trade ; and 

 as this plan succeeds in England with everything, sacred and profane, 

 a temporary success may be anticipated, and the industrial era of Zoo- 

 logy may flourish even in France for a time. For the honour of 

 Science may that period be brief! In the meantime we may ask 

 and endeavour to solve the question, What is its present phasis in a 

 scientific point of view; what its future prospects? 



Ontology, or the science of beings ; Comparative Physiology ; Zoo- 

 logy, in its most extended signification, embracing the existing and 

 the extinct, the living and the dead organic worlds — mean nearly the 

 same thing. The Philosophy of Zoology, a new theory of Zoology, 

 means merely a new " interpretation " of animal nature. No science has 

 in Britain undergone a greater change than this has done during the 

 last half-century, or at least since the times when Smellie wrote and 

 guessed, and the good-natured Goldsmith tried his pen, on what the 

 world was then pleased to call Natural History; we mean, of course, 

 the English world ; for the writings of the illustrious Count de Buf- 



* See Preface to Milne-Ewards's ' Manual of Zoology.' 



