LIFE OF FLOWER 45 



idea as held by the majority, and would not give way 

 to the impulse to bestow a name wherever there is the 

 slightest opening for doing so." 



Here, again, we have golden words, which are 

 unfortunately ignored by a large number of the 

 zoologists and palaeontologists of the present day. 

 Most noteworthy, perhaps, in the whole passage, is the 

 emphasis given to the fact that generic groups are but 

 arbitrary creations of the human, and that, far from 

 being natural realities, they are solely and simply 

 formed as matters of convenience, so that their limits 

 are absolutely dependent upon individual or collective 

 opinion. 



Consequently, when we hear it said as we may that 

 such and such an animal must constitute a genus by 

 itself, we may be assured that in nine cases out of 

 ten the speaker is talking nonsense. It may do so, 

 but this is purely as a matter of convenience for 

 purposes of classification. As examples of Flower's 

 broad and far-seeing way of looking at the limits of 

 generic groups, we may take his inclusion of the foxes 

 in the same group as the wolves, of the polecats and 

 weasels with the martens, of the two-horned with the 

 one-horned rhinoceroses, and of the blackbirds with the 

 thrushes ; and yet in all these instances, as in many 

 others, a large number of his successors many of whom 

 cannot lay claim to anything approaching his intellectual 

 capacity and his power of separating essentials from 

 trivialities cannot be content with the grand simplicity 

 of his scheme of classification. What they gain by 

 their involved systems and minute subdivisions is best 

 known to themselves to the public such complexity 



