This helpful associate is the science of comparative anatomy. Its task is, by comparing the fully-developed bodily forms in the various groups of animals, to learn the general laws of organisation according to which the body is constructed; at the same time, it has to determine the affinities of the various groups by critical appreciation of the degrees of difference between them. Formerly, this work was conceived in a teleological sense, and it was sought to find traces of the plan of the Creator in the actual purposive organisation of animals. But comparative anatomy has gone much deeper since the establishment of the theory of descent; its philosophic aim now is to explain the variety of organic forms by adaptation, and their similarity by heredity. At the same time, it has to recognise in the shades of difference in form the degree of blood-relationship, and make an effort to construct the ancestral tree of the animal world. In this way, comparative anatomy enters into the closest relations with comparative embryology on the one hand, and with the science of classification on the other.
Now, when we ask what position man occupies among the other organisms according to the latest teaching of comparative anatomy and classification, and how man’s place in the zoological system is determined by comparison of the mature bodily forms, we get a very definite and significant reply; and this reply gives us extremely important conclusions that enable us to understand the embryonic development and its evolutionary purport. Since Cuvier and Baer, since the immense progress that was effected in the early decades of the nineteenth century by these two great zoologists, the opinion has generally prevailed that the whole animal kingdom may be distributed in a small number of great divisions or types. They are called types because a certain typical or characteristic structure is constantly preserved within each of these large sections. Since we applied the theory of descent to this doctrine of types, we have learned that this common type is an outcome of heredity; all the animals of one type are blood-relatives, or members of one stem, and can be traced to a common ancestral form. Cuvier and Baer set up four of these types: the vertebrates, articulates, molluscs, and radiates. The first three of these are still retained, and may be conceived as natural phylogenetic unities, as stems or _phyla_ in the sense of the theory of descent. It is quite otherwise with the fourth type—the radiata. These animals, little known as yet at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were made to form a sort of lumber-room, into which were cast all the lower animals that did not belong to the other three types. As we obtained a closer acquaintance with them in the course of the last sixty years, it was found that we must distinguish among them from four to eight different types. In this way the total number of animal stems or phyla has been raised to eight or twelve (cf. Chapter XX).