218 Mr. Bicheno on Systems and Methods in Natural History. 



and with equal safety. It does that at once which is constantly 

 going on in ordinary language, — the modifications of it to ex- 

 press the classes of external objects. The invention of new 

 terms suited to express new ideas in an abridged and com- 

 pressed form, is a slow process, and in most cases is the re- 

 sult of convenience. There is no convention to attain the ob- 

 ject, 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 anti- 

 cipate the slow process usually working in language, and forms 

 at once his instruments of reasoning; and systems and me- 

 thods 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 se- 

 parate 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 na- 

 turalists than by metaphysicians, because the business of the 

 one is to examine characters and qualities more nicely than 

 the subjects entertained by the other will admit of. Never- 

 theless, the one cannot employ these abstractions as instru- 

 ments 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 be- 

 fore the flood, and will continue to be so in spite of systems 

 and methods. The naturalist has attempted only to carry 

 this necessary operation of the mind somewhat further and 

 with more precision, and has thus exposed himself to errors, 

 which the vulgar have escaped. Thus, although there are but 

 two modes of reasoning ; namely, by the use of words expres- 

 sive of an individual and its attributes, or by general words 

 indicative of an aggregation of individuals with their common 

 attributes ; yet naturalists have used their terms in a different 

 sense, and have invented additional ones, such as order, tribe, 

 cohort, family, class, by which they attempt to express with 

 more accuracy larger generalizations than they would do by 

 employing a generic term, and as if they could settle the re- 

 lative rank of the different groups whose existence they have 

 assumed. Whereas the truth is, that in many instances a 

 class may be equivalent to an order or a genus. These dif- 

 ferent 



