486 Mr. BicuEno on Systems and Methods 
enabled the moderns to arrive at conclusions with much more 
expedition than they, and with equal safety. It does that at 
once which is constantly going on in ordinary language,—the 
modifications of it to express the classes of external objects. The 
invention of new terms suited to express new ideas in an abrid ged 
and compressed form, is a slow process, and in most cases is the 
result of convenience. "There is no convention to aítain the 
object, because nobody can arrest the subtile means that are 
employed. But the naturalist being without terms, or at most 
with so few that they are within his power, attempts to anticipate 
the slow process usually working in language, and forms at once 
his instruments of reasoning; and systems and methods can be 
regarded as no further useful, than as they are assimilated to the 
ordinary process of abridging the labour of thought adopted by 
mankind in other subjects of a like nature. = 
Naturalists err greatly who imagine they are employing terms 
possessing some new and distinct properties; whereas all they 
can do is to hold the subjects of natural history together in a loose 
manner by the use of the words species, genus, order, and class ; 
thus presenting certain characters to the mind as separate objects 
of contemplation by means of abstract terms, of a similar though 
somewhat more precise import than those which are employed by 
the rest of mankind in treating general subjects. A stricter use 
may be made of these words by naturalists than by metaphy- 
sicians, because the business of the one is to examine characters 
and qualities more nicely than the subjects entertained by the 
other will admit of. Nevertheless, the one cannot employ these. 
abstractions as instruments of reasoning in a different sense from 
the other. There is no magic about them in the hands of a 
naturalist more than there is in any of the thousand general terms 
in the mouths of the vulgar. ** Rose" and ** Grass" were generic 
names before the flood, and will continue to be so in spite of 
systems 
