BrirpD KILLING IN ORNITHOLOGY. 7 
in the bird for proxy, denominated a genus. Whence, though the 
qualitative value decreases for each bird with the increase in num- 
bers, the quality is always, even on this low arithmetical plane of 
argument, a fundamental property so long as the type is a value; 
and may be exhaustive of the type. There is therefore no 
“merely numerical” status. For the type inheres, even numeric- 
ally taking them, only in its instances.! 
Typehood may thus well be a character of every bird known or 
demonstrable, alive or dead, but each bird even as a unit is also 
unique in the sense that his addition to or subtraction from the 
aggregate alters the type in every single one of its other instances 
by making the characteristic exemplification by each such instance 
less or greater, while nevertheless such remaining instance is 
otherwise unaffected in typical character. And if the type is to 
be permanently definable, this contradiction can be avoided only 
by limiting the type absolutely and in all respects to a single 
instance, in which case we have not a type but an individual. 
Wherefore the identifiable type (one which is liable to new 
instances) is never permanently definable. 
For of course this statement is so confused because I have 
continued to assume, while proving a type in terms of almost 
pure quantity to be qualitatively extremely variable, that the type 
as definable is qualitatively permanent. It is indeed absurd 
to say that of three birds each is 50% of a scientific object; of 
two, each is the whole of the object; but that one alone is no 
such object at all. Yet this arithmetic of the permanently defined 
qualitative type is correct. Itis the permanent qualitative type 
(or type unaffected by its instances) which is wrong, as we well 
know. The qualitative type being inherent only in individuals 
whose definition, even as units, depends that of each on all others, 
is extremely variable; varying with every mutation whatever in 
1 The question of existence nowhere enters into my argument, inasmuch as 
“birds”? which alive or dead never do exist or cannot be demonstrated to be 
about to exist or to have existed are not birds in any sense, scientific or other- 
wise. For a failure to demonstrate is proof of incompatibility with intelligible 
world-order lurking in the alleged “definition”; and any figment of fancy 
(the “perfect,” “ideal,” “typical bird’) fails of actuality just by its wantonly 
insufficient identification. 
