IX THE HISTORY AND SCOPE OF ZOOLOGY 319 



subdivisions of an army or the subdivisions of a 

 territory, tlie greater containing several of the less, as 

 follows : — 



Class. Order. Genus. Species. Variety. 



Genus sum- Genus inter- Genus proxi- Species. Individuum. 



mum. medium. mum. 



Provincia. Territorium. Parcecia. Pagus. Domicilium. 



Legio. Coliors. Manipulus. Contubernium. Miles. 



Linnaeus himself recognised the purely subjective 

 character of his larger groups ; for him species were, 

 however, objective: "There 'are," he said, ''just so 

 many species as in the beginning the Infinite Being 

 created." It was reserved for a philosophic zoologist 

 of the nineteenth century (Agassiz, Essay on Classifica- 

 tion, 1859) to maintain dogmatically that genus, order, 

 and class were also objective facts capable of precise 

 estimation and valuation. This climax was reached at 

 the very moment when Darwin was publishing the 

 Origin of Species (1859), by which universal opinion 

 has been brought to the position that species, as well 

 as genera, orders, and classes, are the subjective ex- 

 pressions of a vast ramifying pedigree in which the 

 only objective existences are individuals, the ap- 

 parent species as well as higher groups being marked 

 out, not by any distributive law, but by the purely 

 non-significant operation of human experience, which 

 cannot transcend the results of death and decay. 



The classification of Linnaeus (from Syst. Nat. 

 12th ed. 1766) should be compared with that of Aris- 

 totle. It is as follows, — the complete list of Linnaean 

 genera being here reproduced : — 



