RANK AND NAMES OF GROUPS. 341 



will pause before he commits his own fame, and inflicts 

 an injury upon science, by publishing to the world 

 crude and superiicial 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. 



CHAP. III. 



ON THE RANK AND NAMES OF THE NATURAL DIVISIONS, OR 

 GROUPS, IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. OF SPECIES AND VA- 

 RIETIES. 



(421.) It 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 



X 3 



