126 The Higher Usefulness of Science 



thinks about the matter, that it must come in the form 

 of well-verified description and classification of the 

 whole complex of organic phenomena implicated in the 

 disease? 



A true though incomplete distinction between de- 

 scription in the ordinary sense and explanation in the 

 ordinary sense is that the process of describing is very 

 little guided by hypothesis, while explaining is very 

 largely so guided. 



II. Philosophical and Ethical Aspect 



Early in the paper, I promised to say something 

 about the baneful effects that have flowed from the 

 neglect by modern biology of the principles of descrip- 

 tion and classification. Sine systeme chaos, is the 

 motto standing at the head of an elaborate recently 

 published work on the arrangement of the animal king- 

 dom. This motto should be adopted, in substance at 

 least, for any and every comprehensive biological 

 treatise, no matter in what field ; and I insist that fail- 

 ure to adopt it has thrown the speculative biology of 

 our time into a literal state of chaos. 



The revolt against the dry and formal nomenclato- 

 rialism into which biology had wandered in the period 

 immediately preceding Darwin, has gone so far as prac- 

 tically to deny that many of the really best established, 

 most important names in biology have any essential 

 meaning at all. Witness, for example, the effort now 



