Comparative anatomy furnishes a second series of facts which are of great importance for the forming of our inductive law. This branch of morphology compares the adult structures of living things, and seeks in the great variety of organic forms the stable and simple law of organisation, or the common type or structure. Since Cuvier founded this science at the beginning of the nineteenth century it has been a favourite study of the most distinguished scientists. Even before Cuvier’s time Goethe had been greatly stimulated by it, and induced to take up the study of morphology. Comparative osteology, or the philosophic study and comparison of the bony skeleton of the vertebrates—one of its most interesting sections—especially fascinated him, and led him to form the theory of the skull which I mentioned before. Comparative anatomy shows that the internal structure of the animals of each stem and the plants of each class is the same in its essential features, however much they differ in external appearance. Thus man has so great a resemblance in the chief features of his internal organisation to the other mammals that no comparative anatomist has ever doubted that he belongs to this class. The whole internal structure of the human body, the arrangement of its various systems of organs, the distribution of the bones, muscles, blood-vessels, etc., and the whole structure of these organs in the larger and the finer scale, agree so closely with those of the other mammals (such as the apes, rodents, ungulates, cetacea, marsupials, etc.) that their external differences are of no account whatever. We learn further from comparative anatomy that the chief features of animal structure are so similar in the various classes (fifty to sixty in number altogether) that they may all be comprised in from eight to twelve great groups. But even in these groups, the stem-forms or animal types, certain organs (especially the alimentary canal) can be proved to have been originally the same for all. We can only explain by the theory of evolution this essential unity in internal structure of all these animal forms that differ so much in outward appearance. This wonderful fact can only be really understood and explained when we regard the internal resemblance as an inheritance from common-stem forms, and the external differences as the effect of adaptation to different environments.