regarded as quadrumana (four-handed), he believed they were properly pedimana (foot-handed). Ogilby's study convinced him that the presence and architecture of hands were key indicators of relationship patterns among certain mammals, and he proposed recognition of a separate mammiferous order to be called cheiropoda (possessing hands) made up of bimana (comprising only man), quadrumana and pedimana (comprising, respectively, monkeys of the Old World and monkeys of the New World). He presented the proposal to the Zoological Society on 8 March 1836 in his paper "Observations on the opposable Power of the Thumb in certain Mammals". This was printed in the Magazine of Natural History in the following year and acclaimed by the systematist Hugh Strickland to be "one of the most valuable and important memoirs ever communicated to this magazine". Ogilby took the classification cheiropoda into actual use and it was recognised and explained, probably by him, in Charles Knight's The Penny Cyclopaedia of 1837. In 1838 he enshrined its basis in his 442-page book, The Natural History of Monkeys, Opossums, and Lemurs, published by Knight for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge as part of the popular series The Menageries. As was the case with other volumes in the series, it appeared anonymously and, although Ogilby referred to himself as the author and was credited as such in The Penny Cyclopaedia, his anonymity has resulted in misattribution. Anonymity on other occasions may conceal a substantial body of work by Ogilby. Despite some initial support for an order of mammals defined by possession of hands, Ogilby's proposal soon attracted objection – quickened in part, no doubt, by aversion to the proximate relationship between man and ape which it implied. He had anticipated opposition, observing that whereas "the metaphysician or the divine may consider man apart from the animal kingdom, the naturalist must view him in a different light: anatomical structure and organic conformation are the only principles which the zoologist can admit as the foundations of natural science... Man is too closely connected with the apes to admit of being placed widely apart from them". Sympathy for Ogilby's order of cheiropoda waned. By 1863 the proposal to classify mammals by reference to thumbs alone was considered eccentric and "has, as might have been expected, never been adopted". Nomenclature argument In 1833 Ogilby became a member of the Natural History Committee of the recently formed British Association for the