into the grand divisions of animate and inanimate nature.
Doubtless the nascent scientist may have imagined life animating
many bodies that we should call inanimate--such as the sun,
wandering planets, the winds, and lightning; and, on the other
hand, he may quite likely have relegated such objects as trees to
the ranks of the non-living; but that he recognized a fundamental
distinction between, let us say, a wolf and a granite bowlder we
cannot well doubt. A step beyond this--a step, however, that may
have required centuries or millenniums in the taking--must have
carried man to a plane of intelligence from which a primitive
Aristotle or Linnaeus was enabled to note differences and
resemblances connoting such groups of things as fishes, birds,
and furry beasts. This conception, to be sure, is an abstraction
of a relatively high order. We know that there are savage races
to-day whose language contains no word for such an abstraction as
bird or tree. We are bound to believe, then, that there were long
ages of human progress during which the highest man had attained
no such stage of abstraction; but, on the other hand, it is
equally little in question that this degree of mental development
had been attained long before the opening of our historical
period. The primeval man, then, whose scientific knowledge we are
attempting to predicate, had become, through his conception of
fishes, birds, and hairy animals as separate classes, a
scientific zoologist of relatively high attainments.

In the practical field of medical knowledge, a certain stage of
development must have been reached at a very early day. Even
animals pick and choose among the vegetables about them, and at
times seek out certain herbs quite different from their ordinary
food, practising a sort of instinctive therapeutics. The cat's