178 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM VOL. 97 
stated as much. Unfortunately, the philosophical basis of taxonomic 
procedure has not been adequately examined. The only discussion of 
taxonomy as a branch of philosophy with which I am familiar is that 
by J. S. L. Gilmour in “The New Systematics.” * At best this is 
inconclusive—first we must have an “epistemological theory of how 
scientists obtain knowledge of the external world” before principles 
underlying the process of classification can be examined. As philos- 
ophy is already a graveyard of outworn epistemological theories, this 
is hardly encouraging. 
Whatever taxonomists may decide a species to be, it appears to the 
philosopher as a dynamic expression of force, a conception which, if 
accompanied by a denial of teleology, leaves us peering ironically into 
the abyss of ignorance in company with the frustrated Mr. Adams, 
still in search of an education, that endless quest for the answer to the 
problem of unity and multiplicity. Perhaps a mere museum taxono- 
mist, working over specimens that come from regions he has never 
visited and that have been preserved in basements for 60 years, has 
no business diving for pearls or tripping the light fantastic on the 
edge of his own abyss of ignorance. Yet all is grist for the mills of 
knowledge and philosophy, and no one can say that a particular oyster 
does not contain a pearl until he opens it.'* 
There seem to be a few meager seed pearls in the thorny oyster of 
pycnogonid systematics. The suggestion that a species is a dynamic 
expression of biological force, and that genera are abstractions repre- 
senting historical events, “dynamic unities in the past,’’ enables one 
to contemplate the large genera, the bizarre species sut generis, and 
the 10-legged forms with some sense of coherence or form. Consid- 
ering a genus as a historical idea, we can regard the genus Nymphon 
as the result of a singularly well adapted dynamic unit, which has 
expanded in many directions—to more than 90 taxonomic species, in 
fact. Continuing this line of reasoning, the monospecific genera in 
such families as the Ammotheidae and Tanystylidae are really species 
with a low dynamic potential—only when a species becomes so differ- 
entiated that it is more than one, when it has begun to display multi- 
plicity in its unity, so to speak, can it be called a member of a genus. 
By rising to generic rank an original species has become ‘‘extinct”’ and 
has been replaced by its descendants but has gained in dynamic force. 
Ten-legged forms, labeled genera for convenience, must be further 
13 Taxonomy and Philosophy, in ‘‘The New Systematics,” pp. 461474. Edited by Julian Huxley, 
Oxford, 1940. 
14 Thoreau, somewhere, describes the pear] as ‘‘a hardened tear of a diseased clam, murdered in its old 
age.’’ Pearls of wisdom secured by injudicious diving into the absolute may have the same dubious 
antecedents, 
18 This conception is discussed at length by Hugh Miller, in “History and Science: A Study of the Rela- 
tion of Historical and,Theoretical Knowledge,’”’ 201 pp., Berkeley, 1939. ‘‘Our purpose is to free empirical 
science from the ghosts of the rationalistie past that still haunt and mislead its progress.’’ Nevertheless, 
the ghosts of teleology and purpose still haunt me. 
