Why did Europe develop botany and zoology, whereas India did not? In a brilliant and fascinating work on animals in Indian ecology and medicine, Francis Zimmermann studies and analyses the "styles of thought" in the Indian and the Western, Greco-Latin tradition, in order to find an answer to this question. More concretely, Zimmermann studies, on the one hand, the "scales of beings" found in Indian texts, especially in Ayurveda, the Indian system of health and longevity, and, on the other hand, the origins of Western botany and zoology for which he uses especially H. Daudin's study on the methods of classification in botany and zoology, from Linnaeus to Lamarck. The present article critically investigates two positions for which Zimmermann argues in his book. First, following the suggestions of Daudin, Zimmermann finds that two aristotelian ideas have opened the way that led European thought from theology to the natural sciences: (a) the idea of a hierarchy of beings (on the basis of a hierarchy of their mental functions); and (b) the idea of continuity. Second, on the basis of a survey of ancient Indian sources, Zimmermann concludes that in India the classification was always ethical, juridical and religious. However, passages from texts of the philosophical schools of Vaises ika and San khya, analysed in this article (§3.1-4.1), clearly show that the latter position is untenable. In subsequent paragraphs it is further shown that it cannot be maintained that Western Antiquity, that is, Aristotle, had ideas, concepts and a rigour of thought that were absent in India. A review of the conditions of the development of botany and zoology in the 17th and 18th century further reveals that there is an important difference between the West and India that has been entirely neglected by Zimmermann. The work and thought of Linnaeus presuppose an international community of scholars that cannot exist without a means of communication, namely printing, that was absent in brahmanical and Hindu India whose texts Zimmermann studies. It is further analysed how the difference between India and the West is not absolute but a matter of the balance between different ways of fixing and transmitting texts, each of which has profound implications for the organisation of knowledge in the text. These different ways include: various ways of oral fixation (e.g. in poetry), handwritten texts, and, since the 15th century in Europe, printing. The "style of thought" regarding living beings - plants and animals, including man - thus appears as heavily conditioned by the means of knowledge transmission, which makes the explanatory device of a postulated "Indian mind" or "Indian mentality" entirely inappropriate, even if we may recognise, impressionistically, a special "way of thinking" in the ancient Indian works at our disposal.
