HAECKEL AND THE NEW ZOOLOGY 



the mollusk, of which the oyster and the snail are 

 familiar examples; the radiate, with its axially dis- 

 posed members, as seen in the starfish; and the low, 

 almost formless protozoon, most of whose representa- 

 tives are of microscopic size. Each of these so-called 

 classes was supposed to stand utterly isolated from the 

 others, as the embodiment of a distinct and tangible 

 idea. So, too, of the lesser groups or orders within 

 each class, and of the still more subordinate groups, 

 named technically families, genera; and, finally, the 

 individual species. That the grouping of species into 

 these groups was more or less arbitrary was of course 

 to some extent understood, yet it was not questioned 

 by the general run of zoologists that a genus, for ex- 

 ample, represented a truly natural group of species 

 that had been created as variations upon one idea or 

 plan, much as an architect might make a variety of 

 houses, no one exactly like any other, yet all conform- 

 ing to a particular type or genus of architecture for 

 example, the Gothic or the Romanesque. That each 

 of the groups defined by the classifiers had such status 

 as this was the stock doctrine of zoology, as also that 

 the individual species making up the groups, and hence 

 the groups themselves, maintained their individual 

 identity absolutely unaltered from the moment of their 

 creation, throughout all successive generations, to the 

 end of their racial existence. 



Such being the fundamental conception of zoology, 

 it remained only for the investigator to study each in- 

 dividual species with an eye to its affinities with other 

 species, that each might be assigned by a scientific 

 classification to the particular place in the original 



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