284 OWEN'S POSITION IN 



of certain characters ; in morphology, therefore, 

 such classifications must have regard only to 

 matters of form, external and internal And 

 natural classification is of perennial importance, 

 because the construction of it is the same thing 

 as the accurate generalisation of the facts of form, 

 or the establishment of the empirical laws of the 

 correlation of structure. 



To say that deer, oxen, sheep, goats, ante- 

 lopes, and so on, form a natural group, definable 

 by the co-existence in them of certain forms of 

 bones, teeth, stomach, and the like, which are 

 not co-existent in any other group, is one way of 

 stating certain facts. It is merely another, if we 

 say that it is an empirical law of existing Nature 

 that such and such structures are always found 

 together ; and that when we meet with one, there 

 is a prima facie ground for suspecting that the 

 others are associated with it. The finder of a 

 recent skull, provided with a pair of horn-cores, in 

 which the front part of the upper jaw is toothless, 

 may thus safely predict that the animal to which 

 it belonged possessed paired hoofs and a complex 

 stomach, though no amount of merely physiolo- 

 gical lore would enable him so much as to guess 

 why the one set of characters is thus constantly 

 associated with the other. The key of the 

 enigma, in fact, does not lie in the hand of the 

 physiologist, bu in that of the historian of animal 

 life throughout the ages of its existence. 



