The ingenuity and utility of
this system are indisputable. But many naturalists think that
something more is meant by the Natural System; they believe that it
reveals the plan of the Creator; but unless it be specified whether
order in time or space, or what else is meant by the plan of the
Creator, it seems to me that nothing is thus added to our knowledge.
Such expressions as that famous one of Linnaeus, and which we often
meet with in a more or less concealed form, that the characters do not
make the genus, but that the genus gives the characters, seem to imply
that something more is included in our classification, than mere
resemblance. I believe that something more is included; and that
propinquity of descent,--the only known cause of the similarity of
organic beings,--is the bond, hidden as it is by various degrees of
modification, which is partially revealed to us by our
classifications.
Let us now consider the rules followed in classification, and the
difficulties which are encountered on the view that classification
either gives some unknown plan of creation, or is simply a scheme for
enunciating general propositions and of placing together the forms
most like each other. It might have been thought (and was in ancient
times thought) that those parts of the structure which determined the
habits of life, and the general place of each being in the economy of
nature, would be of very high importance in classification.
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