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 both, or what
else is meant by the plan of the Creator, it seems to me that nothing is
thus added to our knowledge. Expressions such as that famous one by
Linnaeus, which we often meet with in a more or less concealed form,
namely, that the characters do not make the genus, but that the genus gives
the characters, seem to imply that some deeper bond is included in our
classifications than mere resemblance. I believe that this is the case,
and that community of descent--the one known cause of close similarity in
organic beings--is the bond, which, though observed by various degrees of
modification, 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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