THE EARLY DAYS OF COMPARATIVE ANATOMY. 145 



student who can be persuaded to mitigate the strong and 

 occasionally contentious waters of modem biology with 

 some such diluent will not deny the dissipation. We run 

 a serious risk, as teachers, in neglecting the humane side 

 of scientific literature, and the academic world has 

 already incurred the contemptuous reproach of Edward 

 Gibbon, who tells us that after he left the University his 

 interest in books began to revive. He himself practised 

 the wisdom of extending his mental horizon in every 

 direction, and he attended a course of lectures on 

 anatomy by Dr. William Hunter, the eloquent brother of 

 the more famous John, with the result that we may 

 " sometimes track him in our own snow." 



II. 



To insist that there can be no comparative anatomy 

 without evolution, is to be bound by all the limitations of 

 a strict and academic mind. For the elucidation of an 

 organ in one animal by a comparison with the corre- 

 sponding feature in another was practised in the earliest 

 days of anatomy. The explanation of this community of 

 structure is another story, although naturally a closely 

 related one. The development of an idea may be slow 

 and uncertain, and we must not expect, in groping 

 underground for the roots of knowledge, to find the 

 products which characterise a later growth in the freedom 

 of the atmosphere. To rigorously distinguish, in the 

 early days of anatomy, between a Zootomist, who merely 

 dissected an animal, and a Comparative Anatomist, who 

 resolved the evolution of its parts, is to apply a modern 

 standard to an ancient work, and to deny that com- 

 parative anatomy has arisen by any process of natural 

 growth with which we are acquainted. Who can doubt 

 that in the following two cases, both of them long 



K 



