’Method:
’tie
.. 1
gwtiuldi
vated
men.
the, language
He
Study
of all
therefore,
took,
pains to characterize
of
the animals
in Natural History.
culti
tematic
little
by their efforts.
he
We
al
2..
[.Ianuary,
was but little advanced
Zoology
must come down
to the last cen
tury, to Linnaeus, before we find the his tory taken up where Aristotle had left and some of his suggestions carried out with new vigor and vitality. Aristotle
groups,
of different
or lesser groups. His only divisions are genera and species: classes, orders, and them now, families, as we understand
Besides
species and genera,
must
by the word blood he designated only the red fluid circulating in the higher animals; fluid akin to blood exists in whereas all animals, variously colored in some, but colorless in large number of oth however,
that
a
a
remember,
ers. a
After Aristotle, long period elapsed without any addition to the information he left us. Rome and the Middle Ages gave
us nothing,
hardly
and even
Pliny
added
fact to those that Aristotle re
And though the great natural ists of the sixteenth century gave new a
corded.
to this study, their investigations were chiefly directed towards minute with the animals they had acquaintance an opportunity of observing, mingled with a
impulse
commentaries
upon
the ancients.
Sys
value.
he gives us
orders and classes,—con._idering classes the most comprehensive, then orders, then He did not, how genera, then species. these groups
represent
distin
as
by
ever,
I
their guished by their nature, but only range; they were still to him, as gencrfl and species had been to Aristotle, only larger or smaller groups, not founded up on and limited by different categories of He divided the animal king structure. dom into six classes, which give here, as we shall have occasion
to compare
them
with other classifications :—.l1un-ma1ia, Birds, Reptiles, (sires, Insects, ll’orms. That this classification should have ex pressed all that was known in the last century of the most general relations among animals only shows how dillicult to generalize on such subject; nor
F
should we expect to find when we remember
an easy task,
the vast number
of
quarter of million) al species (about Linnaeus ready noticed by naturalists. in finding com to unite most of his classes; but the Mammalia, that group to which we ourselves belong, re Indeed, in the mained very imperfect. earlier editions of his classification, he does not apply the name of Mammalia to succeeded, mon
however,
character
a
ties among animals by the differences be pointed out. He divided the animal kingdom into two groups, which he call ed Enaima and Anaima, or animals with blood and animals without blood. We
to other
and
weight
a
a
stimulated
on general principles, be yet search into the closer aflini
names
special
it
classification
gave
a
a
a
distinguished those that bring forth living young from those that lay eggs. But system of Nature was not famil though iar even to their great philosopher, and Aristotle had not arrived at the idea of
and
Linnaeus
a
They grouped together quadrupeds also in contradistinction to animals with legs and wings, and they
tives as species.
idea,
only between genera took hold of this
distinguished
and species;
is
are quite
tion of the animal kingdom. Fishes and birds, for instance, they considered as genera, and their different representa
had
it
is
a
is
foreign to the Greek concep
it,
by their cur rent names; and of his descriptions of much their habits and peculiarities, lost upon us from their local character also total ab There and expression. sence of systematic form, of any classifi cation or framework to express the divis ions of the animal kingdom into larger than
to, otherwise
tudes
a
‘
on which
the higher animals characterizing them as the animals with four legs and covered with for or hair, that bring forth living In young and nurse them with milk. thus admitting external features as class this class,
but calls
Quadrupedia,
be excluded many animals which by their mode of reproduction‘ as well as by their respiration and circula
characters,
tion, belong to this class
as much
as
the
