United States or Mozambique ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The greater number of naturalists who have taken into consideration the whole structure of man, including his mental faculties, have followed Blumenbach and Cuvier, and have placed man in a separate Order, under the title of the Bimana, and therefore on an equality with the orders of the Quadrumana, Carnivora, etc.

We have for the same reason omitted the working-girl class and the hucksters; the women of these two sections are the product of efforts made by nine millions of female bimana to rise to the higher civilization. But for its scrupulous exactitude many persons might regard this statistical meditation as a mere joke.

Let us explain: Naturalists consider man to be no more than a unique species of the order bimana, established by Dumeril in his Analytic Zoology, page 16; and Bory de Saint Vincent thinks that the ourang-outang ought to be included in the same order if we would make the species complete.

If the muscles, viscera, or any other part of the animal fabric, including the brain, be compared, the results are declared to be similar. In consequence of these and many other zoological considerations, the order Bimana had already been declared, in 1856, by Isidore G. St.

"What, then, is this order of Bimana of Blumenbach and Cuvier?

The eighteen millions of human beings, whom we have excepted from this consideration, almost invariably contract marriages in accordance with the system which we are trying to make paramount in our system of manners; and as to the intermediary classes by which we poor bimana are separated from the men of privilege who march at the head of a nation, the number of castaway children which these classes, although in tolerably easy circumstances, consign to misery, goes on increasing since the peace, if we may believe M. Benoiston de Chateauneuf, one of the most courageous of those savants who have devoted themselves to the arid yet useful study of statistics.

In order to throw light upon a point so important, let us cast a rapid glance over the male population. From among our fifteen millions of men we must cut off, in the first place, the nine millions of bimana of thirty-two vertebrae and exclude from our physiological analysis all but six millions of people.

Isidore G. St. Hilaire then proceeds to show how, in spite of the great authority of Blumenbach and Cuvier, a large proportion of modern zoologists of note have rejected the order Bimana, and have regarded Man simply as a family of one and the same order, Primates.

Blumenbach, in 1779, proposed to deviate from this course, and to separate Man from the apes as an order apart, under the name of Bimana, or two-handed.

In physical organization their approach to man is singularly close. In anatomy man and the higher apes are in most respects counterparts of each other. The principal anatomical distinction has been considered to be in the foot, which from the opposable character of the great toe was classed by Cuvier with the hand, the apes being named Quadrumana, or four-handed, and man Bimana, or two-handed.