It will easily be understood that when the existence of microscopic
animals was discovered, zoologists had greatly to modify their ideas of
the animal world. Still more was this the case afterwards, when it was
found that all animals were built up of minute parts much resembling
these microscopic animals in their main features. To these unit parts,
of which all animal bodies are composed, the term "cell" is applied.
The name of cell is not very descriptive of these units in the animal
body, but correctly describes the unit of plant structure. In certain
important essential particulars both, however, are alike. Nowadays we
are not content to describe the grouping and external features of cells;
their minute structure also is made a subject of research and inquiry,
and affords a field for most of the fashionable speculations of our own
day.
How great has been the progress made by the science of zoology since the
eighteenth century may be estimated from the following quotation:--
"I remember," says the late George J. Romanes (in his book called "The
Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution"), "once reading a very
comical disquisition in one of Buffon's works on the question as to
whether or not a crocodile was to be classified as an insect; and the
instructive feature in the disquisition was this, that although a
crocodile differs from an insect as regards every conceivable particular
of its internal anatomy, no allusion at all is made to this fact, while
the whole discussion is made to turn on the hardness of the external
casing of a crocodile resembling the hardness of the external casing
of a beetle; and when at last Buffon decides that, on the whole, a
crocodile had better not be classified as an insect, the only reason
given is, that as a crocodile is so very large an animal it would make
'altogether too terrible an insect.'"
How different is the state of knowledge now, when every part of a
crocodile or a cockroach is described in print in the minutest detail,
and set before even the beginner in zoology as a necessary lesson.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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