A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



fabric of classification be abandoned? Clearly not, 

 since there can be no science without classification of 

 facts about labelled groupings, however arbitrary. 

 Classifications then must be retained, perfected; only 

 in future it must be remembered that any classification 

 must be more or less arbitrary, and in a sense false; 

 that it is at best only a verbal convenience, not the 

 embodiment of a final ideal. If, for example, we con- 

 sider the very "natural" group of birds commonly 

 called hawks, we are quite justified in dividing this 

 group into several genera or minor groups, each com- 

 posed of several species more like one another than 

 like the members of other groups of species that is, 

 of other genera. But in so doing we must remember 

 that if we could trace the ancestry of our various 

 species of hawks we should find that in the remote past 

 the differences that now separate the groups had been 

 less and less marked, and originally quite non-existent, 

 all the various species having sprung from a common 

 ancestor. The genera of to-day are cousin-groups, 

 let us say ; but the parents of the existing species were 

 of one brood, brothers and sisters. And what applies 

 to the minor groups called genera applies also, going 

 farther into the past, to all larger groups as well, so 

 that in the last analysis, all existing creatures being 

 really the evolved and modified descendants of one 

 primordial type, it may be said that all animate crea- 

 tion is but a single kind. In this broadened view the 

 details of classification ceased to have the importance 

 once ascribed to them, and the quibblings of the classi- 

 fiers seem amusing rather than serious. 



Yet the changed point of view left the subject by no 



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