RANK AND NAMES OF GROUPS. te G4al 
will pause before he commits his own fame, and inflicts 
an injury upon science, by publishing to the world 
crude and superficial theories of primary divisions and 
circular groups, which have no foundation but in his 
own heated imagination — the result, not of extensive 
experience and matured investigation, but of limited 
materials, and an ignorance of all but one department of 
nature. Let him first become master of all the existing 
knowledge on these subjects, and let him prove the ac- 
curacy of his theories by facts, drawn from all the groups 
of the animal kingdom. He will then be justly entitled 
to have his opinions regarded, and his theories investi- 
gated. 
ON THE RANK AND NAMES OF THE NATURAL DIVISIONS, OR 
GROUPS, IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. — OF SFECIES AND VA~ 
RIETIES. 
(421.) Ir is not only convenient, but absolutely es- 
sential, that the different groups of animals should be 
distinguished by names, indicative, in some measure, of 
their size and relative rank ; just as we should distin- 
guish the component parts of an army, or the different 
ranks of those by whom it is commanded. These 
groups, in fact, are divisions, some large, some small, 
to which various systematic writers have given different 
names. As these names, however, have been bestowed, 
for the most part, without any ulterior reference to a 
uniform plan, and the divisions themselves made al- 
together arbitrarily, we have endeavoured, in another 
part of this volume, to place these designations upon a 
more secure footing, and to show that all the divisions, 
hereafter enumerated, do actually exist in nature ; not, 
indeed, in a strictly arbitrary and rigorous sense, but 
z 3 
