Place of Definition, etc., in Philosophical Biology 107 



I want to show three things : first, exactly what has 

 happened to taxonomy as biology has progressed; sec- 

 ond, something of the monstrousness of the fallacy into 

 which biologists have fallen in conceiving taxonomy as 

 an outgrown stage in the development of biology ; and 

 third, something of the wretched consequences that 

 have resulted from the fall. 



A quotation from Huxley's "Owen's Position in the 

 History of Anatomical Science" may serve as a start- 

 ing point of the discussion : 



"The classifications of the scientific taxonomist are 

 of two kinds. Those of the one sort are merely handy 

 reference catalogues. . . . The others, known as 

 natural classifications, are arrangements of objects 

 according to the sum total of their likenesses, in re- 

 spect of certain characters. . . . And natural classi- 

 fication is of perennial importance, because the con- 

 struction of it is the same thing as the accurate gen- 

 eralization of the facts of form, or the establishment of 

 the empirical laws of the correlation of structure." 



That which makes taxonomic biology as practised 

 by many systematists genuinely superficial, and has so 

 depreciated its value in the minds of many biologists,, 

 is failure to distinguish sharply and see the profound 

 significance of the difference between the two sorts of 

 classification referred to by Huxley. The sort of classi- 

 fication which he calls "merely handy reference cata- 



