ble in detail, is
complete in its broad features. Classification, which is merely a
convenient summary expression of morphological facts, has undergone a
corresponding improvement. The breaks which formerly separated our
groups from one another, as animals from plants, vertebrates from
invertebrates, cryptogams from phanerogams, have either been filled
up, or shown to have no theoretical significance. The question of the
position of man, as an animal, has given rise to much disputation,
with the result of proving that there is no anatomical or
developmental character by which he is more widely distinguished from
the group of animals most nearly allied to him, than they are from one
another. In fact, in this particular, the classification of Linnaeus
has been proved to be more in accordance with the facts than those of
most of his successors.

[Sidenote: Anthropology.]

The study of man, as a genus and species of the animal world,
conducted with reference to no other considerations than those which
would be admitted by the investigator of any other form of animal
life, has given rise to a special branch of biology, known, as
Anthropology, which has grown with great rapidity. Numerous societies
devoted to this portion of science have sprung up, and the energy of
its devotees has produced a copious literature. The physical
characters of the various races of men have been studied with a
minuteness and accuracy heretofore unknown; and demonstrative
evidence of the existence of human contemporaries of the extinct
animals of the latest geological epoch has been obtained, physical
science has thus been brought into the closest relation with history
and with archaeology; and the striking investigations which, during our
time, have put beyond doubt the vast antiquity of Babylonian and
Egyptian civilisation, are in perfect harmony with the conclusions of
anthropology as to the antiquity of the human species.

Classification is a logical process which consists in putting together
those things which are like and keeping asunder those which are
unlike; and a morphological classification, of course, takes notes
only of morphological likeness and unlikeness. So long, therefore, as
our morphological knowledge was almost wholly confined to anatomy, the
characters of groups were solely anatomical; but as the phenomena of
embryology were explored, the likeness and unlikeness of individual
development had to be taken into account; and,