[...]... birds, and fishes with which everyone is acquainted, but he knows a great deal about cuttlefish, snails and oysters, about crabs, crawfish (Palinurus), lobsters, shrimps, and hermit crabs, about seaurchins and starfish, sea-anemones and sponges, about ascidians (which seem to have puzzled him not a little!) He has noticed even fish-lice and intestinal worms, both flat and round Of the smaller land animals,... this influenced by Anaximenes whose primitive matter was infinite air In following out this thought he tried to prove that both fishes and oysters have the power of breathing.[2] A more strictly morphological note is struck by a curious saying of Empedocles (4th century B.C.), that "hair and foliage and the thick plumage of birds are one."[3] In the collected writings of Hippocrates and his school,... forgets that form and structure are but one of the many properties of living things; he takes quite as much interest in their behaviour, their ecology, distribution, comparative physiology He takes a special interest in the comparative physiology of reproduction The HISTORIA ANIMALIUM contains a description of the form and structure of man and of as many animals as Aristotle was acquainted with and he was... classifications, divide animals into gregarious, solitary and social, or land animals into troglodytes, surfacedwellers, and burrowers (Hist Anim., i.) He knew that dichotomous classifications were of little use for animals (De Partibus, i 3) and he explicitly and in so many words accepted the principle of all "natural" classification, that affinities must be judged by comparing not one but the sum total of characters... most clearly in the case of man and the viviparous quadrupeds, with whose structure he was best acquainted In the HISTORIA ANIMALIUM he takes man as a standard, and describes his external and internal parts in detail, then considers viviparous quadrupeds and compares them with man "Whatever parts a man has before, a quadruped has beneath; those that are behind in man form the quadruped's back" (Cresswell,... It will be noticed in the first and last of these three quotations that Aristotle recognises the fact of correlation between systems of organs—between limbs and bones, and between bloodvessels and the parts to which they go Sanguineous animals all possess certain organs—heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, and so on Other organs occur in most of the classes—the œsophagus and the lungs "The position which... "in excess and defect" in the different members of the group But he did not realise that this fact of community of plan constituted a problem in itself His interest was turned towards the functional side of living things, form was for him a secondary result of function Yet he was not unaware of facts of form for which he could not quite find a place in his theory of organic form, facts of form which... distinction between homogeneous and heterogeneous parts; sixth, a generalisation on the succession of forms in development; and seventh, the first enunciation of the idea of the ÉCHELLE DES êtres (1) What surprises the modern reader of t h e HISTORIA ANIMALIUM perhaps more than anything else is the extent and variety of Aristotle's knowledge of animals He describes more than 500 kinds.[7] Not only does he... astonishingly large number The later DE PARTIBUS Animalium is a treatise on the causes of the form and structure of animals Owing to the importance which Aristotle ascribed to the final cause this work became really a treatise on the functions of the parts, a discussion of the problems of the relation of form to function, and the adaptedness of structure Aristotle was quite well aware that each of the big groups.. .and if this book helps in any degree to counteract this tendency so far as animal morphology is concerned, it will have served its purpose I owe a debt of gratitude to my friends Dr James F Gemmill and Prof J Arthur Thomson for much kindly encouragement and helpful criticism The credit for the illustrations is due to my wife, Mrs Jehanne A Russell One is from Nature; the . anatomical. He traced the chief nerves of sense to the brain, which he considered to be the seat of the soul, and he made some good guesses at the mechanism of the organs of special sense. He showed that,.