282 ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION. 



and no more subject to arbitrary modifications than any 

 other law expressing natural phenomena; as soon as it is 

 made plain that the natural limits of all these groups may 

 be ascertained by careful investigations, the interest in 

 the study of classification, or the systematic relationship 

 existing among all organized beings, which has almost 

 ceased to engage the attention of the more careful original 

 investigators, will be revived ; and the manifold ties which 

 link together all animals and plants as the living expres- 

 sion of a gigantic conception, carried out in the course of 

 time, like a soul-breathing epos will be scrutinized anew, 

 determined with greater precision, and expressed with 

 increasing clearness and propriety. Fanciful and artifi- 

 cial classifications will gradually lose their hold upon a 

 better informed community ; scientific men themselves 

 will be restrained from bringing forward immature and 

 premature investigations ; no characteristics of new spe- 

 cies will have a claim upon the notice of the learned, 

 which have not been fully investigated, and compared 

 with those most closely allied to it; no genus will be 

 admitted, the structural peculiarities of which are not 

 clearly and distinctly illustrated ; no family will be con- 

 sidered as well founded, which shall not exhibit a distinct 

 system of forms intimately combined and determined by 

 structural relations ; no order will appear admissible, 

 which shall not represent a well-marked degree of struc- 

 tural complication ; no class will deserve that name, which 

 shall not appear as a distinct and independent expression 

 of some general plan of structure, carried out in a pecu- 

 liar way and with peculiar means; no type will be re- 

 cognized as one of the fundamental groups of the animal 

 kingdom, which shall not exhibit a plan of its own, not 

 convertible into another. No naturalist will be justified 



