166 THE president's address. 



ledge dealing with concrete objects, simply because the mind 

 devoted to the study of any particular set of things, animate 

 or inanimate, soon becomes perforce acquainted with a variety 

 of objects so far exceeding that which ever comes within the 

 ken of the casual observer, that in order to arrange them in an 

 orderly and intelligible system of classification, it is necessary to- 

 draw distinctions and institute comparisons which are never 

 dreamt of in the 'philosophy of the mind occupied with other- 

 pursuits. 



Hence there is a great contrast between scientific and popular 

 systems of classification, especially when dealing with living 

 things. The classification used by the expert is bewildering and 

 unintelligible to the popular mind, while to the serious student^, 

 popular classifications are often naive, inadequate and ludicrous 

 in the extreme. Take for instance the animal kingdom ; popular- 

 speech recognises five classes as follows: (1) "animals," a word- 

 which now generally replaces the Biblical term ''beasts," and 

 which is sometimes qualified further as the " lower animals," to- 

 distinguish them from the self-styled lord of creation, the higher- 

 animal, man; (2) "birds"; (3) "reptiles"; (4) "fishes"; and 

 (5) "insects." The last comprehensive division includes prac- 

 tically all that the zoologist terms invertebrates, except a few 

 popularly classed as reptiles or fishes. Even the forms of life- 

 known to the zoologist as Protozoa would be termed " insects " 

 without hesitation by the uninstructed. This primitive five-fold 

 classification of animals is by no means peculiar to the illiterate 

 or the uneducated ; it is met with in the writings even of men 

 learned in other branches of knowledge. In one of the Fabian 

 Essays the worker in a modern community is compared to a 

 coral-insect in a sponge, by a writer evidently quite unaware- 

 that the coral -producing organism is not an insect, and that in 

 any case it would not be found in a sponge. 



The almost painful divergence between scientific and popular 

 notions with regard to natural objects is not, however, a chasm 

 which was split open, so to speak, by a single shock. Scientific 

 classifications did not spring in one instant from the scientific 

 brain, like Pallas Athene in full armour from the head of Zeus, 

 previously vexed by a i slight headache. On the contrary, modern 

 classifications of living beings are the outcome of a long, slow, 

 and often painful process of growth and evolution in the past,. 



