THE BASIS OF CLASSIFICATION. 



WE come now to another kind of science work.* We are no 

 longer asking : What i l s this ? or, How does this happen ? but 

 Why is this so ? Our eyes will not help us as much now, but if 

 we have used them to train our imaginations and have laid up 

 a good store of facts, we are ready to begin these more diffi- 

 cult but far more interesting studies. 



As you study, you will see more and more that science is 

 not purposely dry and hard and uninteresting, but that it is 

 an attempt to make study easier by grouping together related 

 facts so that you will have fewer of them to remember. A 

 scientific arrangement is always the easiest arrangement. A 

 great deal of scientific work is only an attempt to sort things 

 of a kind in an orderly manner, so that they may be referred 

 to with the least time and trouble. 



If a scientist had ten thousand living creatures of all sorts, 

 from bees and spiders up to birds and beasts, to arrange and 

 name, how would he do it ? 



What would you do if you were given twenty kinds of peas 

 and beans mixed together in a basket, and were told to sepa- 

 rate each kind without mistakes ? You would not begin by 

 sorting them into twenty baskets ; that would give too many 

 chances for errors. And you would not put the dwarf peas 

 with the dwarf beans, and the tall peas with the pole beans, 

 merely because their habits were similar ; nor the white peas 

 and beans together, because they were of the same color, for 

 you would say that any bean is more like every other bean 

 than it is like any pea. 



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