Excerpt from Zoology the Study of Animal Life
The word zoology is derived from the Greek word zoon, which meant "animal," and from the termination - logia, which signified a discourse. The name therefore, as might be expected, denotes the science of animals, and is therefore narrower in its scope than the science of biology, which deals with everything living and of which the science of zoology forms a subdivision.
We see, therefore, that at the outset we are faced with two fundamental questions, viz. (1) What is life? and(2) What is an animal? To no two questions is it more difficult to give a precise answer than to these. If with Herbert Spencer we define life "as the continuous adjustment of internal to external relations," who is the wiser, or who has any better conception of life as a result of the definition?
The better way of approaching the problem is the historical one, and instead of asking "What is life?" or "What is an animal?" let us rather ask how the ideas embodied in the terms "life" and "animal" took their origin.
The word "animal" is derived from the same root as the Latin word "anima." This originally denoted simply "wind" or "breeze." It was then used to denote "breath," i.e. the air sucked into and ejected from the lungs in respiration. Breath was recognised by the ancients as the universal concomitant of life and activity in man and animals, and indeed it was regarded by them as the essential principle or cause of animal life.
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