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 imj'jortance, 
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, sheejj, 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 p7'tm(i 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 U 2 )per 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. 
