CHAPTER VI 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SYSTEMATIC CLASSIFICATION 



BEFORE LINN^US 



Primitive systematic categories of animals and plants 



AS LONG AS man's KNOWLEDGE OF NATURE is limited to what he can ob- 

 serve in his immediate vicinity, he has little difficulty in controlling 

 L the objects of his knowledge, but when his range of vision widens, 

 there arises the irresistible need for combining the individual objects that 

 have been observed under general expressions, which serve to fix the knowl- 

 edge of them and to impart it to others, "since no language would suffice to 

 denote everything individually, and since in a language which did so, no 

 understanding, no common knowledge, nor retention of such an infinity of 

 terms would be possible" (F. A. Lange). Those categories in which natural 

 objects are thus grouped by the most primitive peoples, out of sheer practical 

 necessity, are naturally based on such qualities in animals and plants as well 

 as the inanimate things that are observed as are easily comprehended, strik- 

 ing to the eye, and of special importance to the observers, and such terms are 

 also used and invented even today among civilized peoples by all those who 

 are concerned with nature in a purely practical way. On the other hand, a 

 grouping of natural objects based on scientific principles has taken a long 

 time to develop. In this respect the ancient Greek natural philosophy was 

 content with the primitive popular nomenclature. Practically the first to 

 devote scientific study to these groupings were, as far as we know, Plato 

 and Aristotle. From Plato originates grouping in species and genera — that 

 is to say, laterally arranged and superordinated terms — and his school still 

 further extended this grouping of terms: the dichotomical determination- 

 tables which even today play such an important part in plant and animal 

 systematization originate from his school. But the further this grouping of 

 terms went on, the more abstract became the result; the higher one came in 

 the series of terms arranged one above another, the further away has one 

 come from the things which one started from. This is a fact which the 

 biological systematicians have not always realized; the practical advantage 

 of systematic categories has led to the zoologist's and the botanist's for- 

 getting how artificial their system has really become. 



System of Aristotle 

 In this direction Aristotle did not go beyond what Plato had initiated; in his 

 biological works there are, as is well known, only two systematical terms: 



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