|
an artificial
enunciating, as briefly as possible, general propositions,— that is, by one sentence to give the characters common, for instance, to all mammals, by another those common to all carnivora, by another those common to the dog-genus, and
by adding a single sentence, a full description is given of each kind of dog. The ingenuity and utility of this system are indisputable. But many naturalists think that something more is meant by the Natural System; they believe that it reveals the plan of the Creator; but unless it be specified whether order in time or space, or
→both, or what
else is meant by the plan of the Creator, it seems to me that nothing is thus added to our knowledge.
as that famous one
Linnæus,
which we often meet with in a more or less concealed form,
the characters do not make the genus, but that the genus gives the characters, seem to imply that
→some deeper bond
is included in our
than mere resemblance. I believe that
→this is the case,
and that
of
the
known cause of
similarity
organic
is the bond,
→which though observed
by various degrees of
is partially revealed to us by our classifications. |
| Let us now consider the rules followed in classification, and the difficulties which are
on the view that classification either gives some unknown plan of creation, or is simply a scheme for enunciating general propositions and of placing together the forms most like each other. It might have been thought (and was in ancient times thought) that those parts of the structure which determined the habits of life, and the general place of each being in the economy of nature, would be of very high importance in classification. Nothing can be more false. No one regards the external similarity of a mouse to a shrew, of a dugong to a whale, of a whale to a fish, as of any importance. These resemblances, though so intimately connected with the whole life of the being, are ranked as merely "adaptive or analogical characters;" but to the consideration of these resemblances we shall
recur. It may even be given as a general rule, that the less any part of the organisation is concerned with special habits, the more important it becomes for classification. As an instance: Owen, in speaking of the dugong, says, "The generative
being those which are most remotely related to the habits and food of an animal, I have always regarded as affording very clear indications of its true affinities. We are least likely in the modifications of these organs to mistake a merely adaptive for an essential character."
how remarkable it is that the organs of vegetation, on which their
life
are of little
→OMIT
|
