i 7 6 



ZOOLOGY 



Classifica- 

 tion aims to 

 express re- 

 lationship 



column, or so-called backbone (really a multitude of 

 bones) ; so it is a Vertebrate animal. It is warm- 

 blooded ; so it must be a Mammal or a Bird. There is 

 hair upon its body, but no trace of feathers ; this is 

 decisive, it is a mammal. The finger nails and the form 

 of the teeth suffice to indicate the order Primates ("for 

 the first shall be last, and the last shall be first"), which 

 contains man and the monkeys. The large brain and 

 relatively long legs with flattened soles show that it is 

 one of the Hominidse, of which the only living genus is 

 Homo. The creature therefore is a man. The existing 

 men are all considered to belong to a single species, 

 Homo sapiens, but there are many races and subspecies. 

 If the man has pale (so-called "white") skin, and hair 

 which is not "woolly," he surely belongs to the sub- 

 species europceus, and is zoologically European, al- 

 though politically perhaps American. This sounds 

 cumbersome, but of course in practice the zoologist 

 takes a short cut to his conclusion. He perceives im- 

 mediately that the animal before him belongs to a 

 particular group, and has only to ascertain its position 

 in that group. If he finds that there is no place for it 

 in the system, that no description hitherto made fits it, 

 he calls it "new," and proceeds to describe it and give it 

 a name. 



3. So far, the object has been simply to sort objects 

 and data 1 so that they can be easily found ; but modern 

 classification has much more ambitious purposes. It is 

 nothing less than to express by means of the arrange- 

 ments the actual "blood" (or "sap") relationship be- 

 tween organisms. Classification thus aims to reveal 

 the actual plan of nature, not merely an artificial plan 



1 Data is the plural of datum. Those who should know better often use 

 it as if it were singular. 



