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ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION.

and no more subject to arbitrary modifications than anyother law expressing natural phenomena; as soon as it ismade plain that the natural limits of all these groups maybe ascertained by careful investigations, the interest inthe study of classification, or the systematic relationshipexisting among all organized beings, which has almostceased to engage the attention of the more careful originalinvestigators, will be revived; and the manifold ties whichlink together all animals and plants as the living expres-sion of a gigantic conception, carried out in the course oftime, like a soul-breathing epos will be scrutinized anew,determined with greater precision, and expressed withincreasing clearness and propriety. Fanciful and artifi-cial classifications will gradually lose their hold upon abetter informed community; scientific men themselveswill be restrained from bringing forward immature andpremature investigations; no characteristics of new spe-cies will have a claim upon the notice of the learned,which have not been fully investigated, and comparedwith those most closely allied to it; no genus will beadmitted, the structural peculiarities of which are notclearly and distinctly illustrated ; no family will be con-sidered as well founded, which shall not exhibit a distinctsystem of forms intimately combined and determined bystructural relations; no order will appear admissible,which shall not represent a well-marked degree of struc-tural complication ; no class will deserve that name, whichshall not appear as a distinct and independent expressionof some general plan of structure, carried out in a pecu-liar way and with peculiar means; no type will be re-cognized as one of the fundamental groups of the animalkingdom, which shall not exhibit a plan of its own, notconvertible into another. No naturalist will be justified