CLASSIFICATION. 



61 



these singly has a story to tell, to which story, until it 

 lias been known, no name or other word can be any 

 guide. In this case the best, and indeed the only 

 index that can be of use is, an inde.v of relations, not 

 an index to the individual facts or subjects, but one 

 which shall, from the knowledge of one fact or sub- 

 ject, guide us to a second, from that second to a third, 

 and so on. These relations apply equally to n~hnt 

 exists and to what happen*, and they are the means 

 of knowledge, and not knowledge itself the instru- 

 ment, not the end. For knowledge, like every thing 

 else, must be of the same kind with its beginning, and 

 be stable or unstable according to the foundation on 

 which it rests. Whether we seek to be informed, 

 relative to the productions of nature simply as they 

 exist, or the phenomena or changes which they dis- 

 play in the course of time, we must have a beginning 

 in addition to our index of relations. Our progress, 

 to use a homely expression, is by means of a bridge, 

 of which facts are the piers, and relations the arches ; 

 and though we cannot pass over by means of the piers 

 without the arches, yet the arches can have no sup- 

 port but the piers. 



There are two sets of persons, each of which are in 

 possession of one of these elements of knowledge 

 without the other ; and for this reason they may be 

 both said to be ignorant. Common observers have 

 the piers of the bridge without the arches ;-and men 

 who have studied the systems in the books have the 

 materials of the arches, but want the piers for support- 

 ing them ; and thus, to them, the arches are no arches 

 at all. Their case is much more hopeless than that 

 of the former class ; because, just as piers can exist 

 without arches, while arches cannot exist without 

 piers ; so facts, accurately observed, are sound know- 

 ledge in the exact proportion of their accuracy and 

 to the full extent of their number, whether the pos- 

 sessor of them know the relations between them or 

 not. But still, the piers, notwithstanding all their 

 stability, will not carry one across the river, uidess 

 they are brought so near to each other as to become 

 stepping stones, which can be the case only in the 

 thallows. Thus, though the matter-of-fact man is not 

 so utterly ignorant as the mere theorist, he is still not 

 in a condition to make advances in knowledge by 

 means of the knowledge he already possesses ; and 

 it is the capacity of converting the knowledge which 

 we h.ive into the means, and the certain means, of 

 obtaining more, which is most valuable. 



Clauificaiion, m the natural history sense of the term, 

 always has reference to beings or existences, and not 

 to phenomena or appearances ; though appearances 

 are used as the means of classification ; and any clas- 

 sification is valuable in proportion to the kind of 

 appearance, or character as it is called, which is 

 made the basis of it. The doing of this must depend 

 upon the knowledge and judgment of him who makes 

 the classification ; and as the classification is the 

 real instrument in the acquiring of knowledge, it is 

 essential that the man who attempts to make or to 

 alter a classification, should possess the most extensive 

 information, and the most sound and scrutinising 

 judgment, upon this very simple and obvious prin- 

 ciple, that he who does not intimately know, and 

 justly and impartially estimate all the characters 

 (that is the known characters) of every individual 

 which the class includes, is riot prepared for giving a 

 useful or even an honest judgment, as to what should 

 be the common character of the class. 



This applies to all classifications, and to all the 

 paits, primary, intermediate, or subordinate, of which 

 they are made up ; and in the subordinate parts, 

 those which come as near as possible to the specific 

 distinctions, in which we consider things as identical 

 in their natures, and differing only as individual ex- 

 istences, it is necessary to be more accurate, and to 

 see farther than in the grand and primary divisions. 

 In these cases, no man has a title to alter any classifi- 

 cation, unless he is fully prepared to justify his altera- 

 tion through every step and stage upward to the 

 simplest division which can be made of natural sub- 

 stances, or even up to the simple fact of existence. 



And it is especially necessary to impress this truth 

 upon all who are only beginning the study of nature, 

 or who have made but little progress in it. The 

 beginnings of science, though mere molehills in 

 reality, seem mountains in the eyes of the com- 

 mencing student ; and they seem the more so, the 

 more earnestly and even the more honestly that he 

 enters on the study. If we may use the expression, 

 the eye of the mind begins the study of any thing 

 with microscopic power, which magnifies to a very 

 great extent ; but as the quantity of knowledge 

 accumulates, the magnifying power diminishes, and 

 after a long life spent in scientific pursuits, individual 

 objects sink down in their importance, and appear 

 insignificant in comparison with the number and mag- 

 nitude of the whole. Hence it is, that those men 

 who are the best qualified, and therefore the best en- 

 titled to make or to alter classifications, always set 

 about making such alterations with the greatest caution 

 and reluctance. And, paradoxical though it may 

 seem, it is nevertheless true, that all the war of 

 systems, and all the wranglings about classifications, 

 which have so often disturbed, and we fear we may 

 add demented, the scientific world, especially natural- 

 ists, have really been waged by parties, not altogether 

 dissimilar to those who are said to have fought the 

 first pitched battles recorded by the poets of antiquity, 

 "the frogs and the mice, the pigmies and the cranes." 



With the desire of impressing this truth fully be- 

 fore us, we shall not venture to suggest any particular 

 classification, or any modification of one which exists, 

 but shall confine ourselves to a very simple outline 

 of the meaning of the term, and of the advantages 

 which are derivable from the right use of it. 



Nature is so wide a field, that no one science can 

 be made to embrace the whole of it with any thing 

 like precision ; and therefore when we speak of natu- 

 ral history in the proper sense of the words, we mean 

 little else than a catalogue raisonne of a considerable 

 number of sciences, with some slight sketch of their 

 relations to each other. This may be considered as 

 one primary step of classification, the beginning, as it 

 were ; and under it we are not called upon to do 

 much more than to explain clearly what we mean by 

 subject or being, and what by appearance or pheno- 

 menon. Some view of this, as it applies to the sub- 

 jects to be known, will be found in the Introduction 

 to this work ; and all that remains would be to men- 

 tion the names of the different branches of science, 

 as applied to the knowledge of those subjects. 

 This is, however, unnecessary, because it would be 

 impossible, without occupying more space than we 

 can devote to it, to make it the vehicle of much 

 meaning. The three primary subjects are, matter 

 which neither grows nor lives, growing matter, and 

 living matter. The first is a very extensive subject, 



