THE HISTORY OF ANATOMICAL SCIENCE 285 



In the middle of the eighteenth century, the 

 value of the artificial systems invented by Lin- 

 naeus, as a part of his method of introducing order 

 into the chaos of ' Natural History,' was so much 

 felt, that his clear recognition of their essentially 

 provisional character was ignored by the host of 

 disciples ; who, as usual, appreciated most highly, 

 and were most sedulous to imitate, the weakest 

 parts of their master's teachings. The genius of 

 Buffon strove against this tendency to substitute 

 empty schematisms for science almost in vain. 

 Botany became a cataloguing of ' hay ; ' and zoo- 

 logy, of skins and shells ; indeed, of straw, if I 

 may revive a jest of my old friend Edward Forbes 

 — not without serious application even in his time 

 — to the effect that the pure systematic zoologist, 

 was unaware that the stuffed skins he named and 

 arranged ever had contained anything but straw. 



Before long, however, better days began to- 

 dawn ; and the light came partly from the purely 

 scientific anatomists, partly from men of more or 

 less anatomical knowledge, in whom the artistic 

 habit of visualising ideas was superadded to that 

 capacity for exact observation which is the foun- 

 dation of both art and science. 



Scientific observation tells us that living birds 

 form a group or class of animals, through which a 

 certain form of skeleton runs ; and that this kind 

 of skeleton differs in certain well-defined cha- 

 racters from that of mammals. On the other 



