ORGANIC EVOLUTION 43 



insects. The fungi feed like animals, as do all 

 vegetable parasites. Yet there are sufficient other sim- 

 ilarities between these lowly organisms, and the 

 vegetable kingdom in general, to classify them with the 

 latter. In the matter of mobility, and fixity, there is 

 the same quality in some degree in both kingdoms. Yet 

 the matter of moving from place to place is so over- 

 whelmingly in favor of the animal in general that there 

 is little difficulty in making the classification. 



Linnaeus, Cuvier, and all naturalists who undertook to 

 reduce the innumerable living organisms on the earth 

 to an orderly system, soon discovered analogous struc- 

 ture and function in all. Both kingdoms are made up 

 of such numerous diverse forms, that it required won- 

 derful intellectual ability and judgment, to so arrange 

 them, in groups subordinate to groups, having such abid- 

 ing characteristics in common, that the members of each 

 group could always be properly placed, by means of 

 their group characteristics. At first it was thought that 

 those animal structures whose functions were of the 

 widest use to the individual, and most apparent to the 

 eye, should be taken as the abiding characters for classi- 

 fication. That was the method of Linnaeus. Form and 

 outline were the elements. Darwin says that, "Lin- 

 naeus misled by appearance actually classed an homop- 

 terous insect as a moth. ' ' But experience demonstrated 

 that really the most persistent structures, and the most 

 helpful in classification, were the more obscure, and 

 the least useful. Cuvier made the beginning of the 

 internal method, by dissection, anatomy, and physiology. 

 This is also a very strong proof of evolution, or deriva- 

 tion, by variation and inheritance; because, if, for ex- 

 ample, all the vertebrates have backbones internally, and 

 the orders of that division include such wonderful dif- 



