256 ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION. 



consider individuals as representatives of species ; but no 

 one individual nor any number of individuals represents 

 its species only, without representing also at the same 

 time, as we have seen above (Sect. I to V) its genus, its 

 family, its order, its class, its branch. 



Before attempting to prove the whole of this proposi- 

 tion, I will first consider the characters of the individual 

 animals. Their existence is scarcely limited as to time 

 and space within definite and appreciable limits. No one 

 nor all of them represent fully, at any particular tim, 

 their species; they are always only the temporary repre- 

 sentatives of the species, inasmuch as each species exists 

 longer in nature than any of its individuals. All the in- 

 dividuals of any or of all species now existing are only 

 the successors of other individuals which have gone be- 

 fore, and the predecessors of the next generations : they 

 do not constitute the species, they represent it. The 

 species is an ideal entity, as much as the genus, the family, 

 the order, the class, or the type; it continues to exist, 

 while its representatives die, generation after generation. 

 Again, these representatives do not represent simply what 

 is specific in the individual, but they exhibit and repro- 

 duce in the same manner, generation after generation, all 

 that is generic in them, all that characterizes the family, 

 the order, the class, the branch, with the same fulness, the 

 same constancy, the same precision. Species, then, exist 

 in nature in the same manner as any other group; they 

 are quite as ideal in their mode of existence as genera, 

 families, etc., or quite as real. But individuals truly exist 

 in a different way: no one of them exhibits at one time 

 all the characteristics of the species, even though it be 

 hermaphrodite, neither do any two represent it, even 

 though the species be not polymorphous, for individuals 



