CuAP. 11. CONCLUSIONS. 177 



SECTION IX. 



CONCLUSIOXS. 



The importance of such an investigation as the preceding, must be obvious to 

 every philosophical investigator. As soon as it is understood that all the different 

 groups introduced into a natural system may have a definite meaning; as soon 

 as it can be shown that each exhibits a definite relation among living beings, 

 founded in nature, 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 Hving expression 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 artificial 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 species will have a claim upon the notice of the learned, which has 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 distincth" 

 illustrated ; no family will be considered as well founded, which shall not exhibit 

 a distinct system of forms intimately combined and determined by structural rela- 

 tions; no order will appear admissible, which shall not represent a well-marked 

 degree of structural complication ; no class will deserve that name, which shall 

 not appear as a distinct and independent expression of some general plan of struc- 

 ture, carried out in a peculiar way and with peculiar means ; no type will be 

 recognized as one of the fundamental groups of the animal kingdom, which shall 

 not exhibit a ])]an of its own, not convertible into another. No naturalist will 

 be justified in introducing any one of these groups into our systems without show- 

 ing: 1st, that it is a natural group; 2d, that it is a group of this or that kind, 

 to avoid, henceforth, calling families groups that may be genera, famiUes groups that 

 may be orders, classes or types groups that may be orders or classes ; 3d, that the 

 characters by which these groups may be recognized are in fact respectively specific, 



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