70 JKEWEW3. 



can see nothing in animated "nature more profoundly significant than their 

 " ciliary epithelium" and the "segmentation process." 



Whatever may be thought of the freaks of fancy that some of its 

 votaries have indulged in, however we may reprobate the perversions of 

 truth and common sense which have been engrafted on it in certain 

 quarters, this much is fairly to be said of the Transcendental school of 

 Natural History, that its original principles were calculated to suggest, to 

 a reverential spirit, some of the most striking arguments which Natural 

 Theology has to offer for the infinite wisdom and universal agency of one 

 God. Nay, they seem to be such as can scarcely fail to excite some 

 notions of this sort in any unprejudiced mind, even when the distinct 

 acknowledgment of that presiding intelligence is most studiously eschewed 

 by the teachers of natural science, and although " God," " Creation," and 

 " Providence" be set aside for such equivocal terms as " Nature," u Law," 

 or " Necessity." It might appear, too, as if the systematic part of Natural 

 History were thus placed on a more unalterable base, in being referred to 

 certain principles exterior to and independent of the modes of operation of 

 the human intellect ; as a mere artificial instrument of which classification 

 has sometimes been regarded. It is all the more surprising to find Bur- 

 meister, who has laboured before so hard, and, as many may think, so 

 successfully — whatever he himself may judge of it now — to establish a 

 natural classification on philosophical grounds, in the present work almost 

 giving up the objective truth of natural groups in zoology, while he retains 

 them for a method of exposition. " The only real existence is the lowest 

 and last division, called Species ; this alone can be seen, felt, caught, 

 exhibited in collections; — all the other superior groups are mere con- 

 ceptions, framed according to the agreement of certain characters, but of 

 which the real existence must be denied. There exists neither Bird nor 

 Fish, but only a Sparrow, a Crow, a Hen ; or a Carp, a Pike, a Herring, &c. 

 — the first three are Birds, the others Fishes, but none of them a mere Bird, 

 or a mere Fish." The fallacy here is so palpable that it is hard to com- 

 prehend how it could for a moment have imposed upon a philosopher like 

 Burmeister. The argument — if it is good for anything, and not a mere play 

 upon words — goes equally to negative the real existence of species. After 

 he had said, a little way back, that in an army the individual soldier alone 

 has a real existence, why not affirm that individual animals alone exist, 



and not species — that no one is a mere man, but also John, or James, &c 



that is, distinguished by some marks — be they but particular existence in a 

 definite portion of space and time — from every other man. It is clear that 



