CLASSIFICATION. 387 



one scheme. He also points out the apparent loss of 

 labour in making any large bifurcate classification ; but 

 this he considers to be fully recompensed by the logical 

 value of the result, and the logical training acquired in its 

 execution. Jeremy Bentham, then, fully recognises, as I 

 conceive, the value of the Logical Abecedarium under 

 another name, though he apprehends the limit to its use 

 placed by the finiteness of our mental and manual powers. 



Mr. George Bentham has also fully recognised the 

 value of bifurcate classification, both in his * Outline of a 

 New System of Logic ' u (pp. 105-118), and in his ' Essai 

 sur la Nomenclature et la Classification/ This latter 

 work consists of a free translation or improved version in 

 French of Jeremy Bentham's 'Essay on Classification/ 

 Further illustrations of the value of the bifurcate method 

 are adduced from the natural sciences, and Mr. Bentham 

 points out that it is really this method which was employed 

 by Lamark and Decandolle in their so-called analytical 

 arrangement of the French Flora. The following table 

 contains an excellent example of bifurcate division, con- 

 sisting of the principal classes of Decandolle's system, as 

 given by Mr. Bentham in Table No. III. p. 108 of his 

 Essay, the names, however, being translated : 



u Concerning the connexion of this work with the great discovery of 

 the quantification of the predicate, I may refer the reader to the remarks 

 and articles of Mr. Herbert Spencer and Professor Thomas Spencer 

 Baynes, in the 'Contemporary Review' of March, April, and July, 1873, 

 vol. xxi. pp. 490, 796 ; vol. xxii. p. 318 ; as also to my own article in 

 answer to Professor Baynes in the same Review for May, 1873, vol. xxi. 

 p. 821. Professor Baynes makes it evident that, when Sir W. Hamilton 

 reviewed Mr. Bentham's work in 1833, he did not sufficiently acquaint 

 himself with its contents. I must continue to hold that the principle of 

 quantification is explicitly stated by Mr. Bentham, and it must be re- 

 garded as a remarkable fact in the history of logic that Hamilton, while 

 vindicating, in 1847, his own claims to originality and priority against 

 the scheme of De Morgan, should have overlooked the much earlier 

 and more closely related discoveries of Bentham. 



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