Overview

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1851 Excerpt: ...in the Linnaean classification, that it places (which by the way it does not) the violet by the side of the oak: it certainly dissevers natural affinities, and brings together things quite as unlike as the oak and the violet are. But the difference, apparently so wide, which renders the juxtaposition of those two vegetables so suitable an illustration of a bad arrangement, depends, to the common eye, mainly on mere size and texture; now if we made it our study to adopt the classification which would involve the least peril of similar rapprochemens, we should return to the obsolete division into trees, shrubs, and herbs, which though of primary importance with regard to mere general aspect, yet (compared even with so petty and unobvious a distinction as that into dicotyledons and monocotyledons) answers to so few differences in the other properties of plants, that a classification founded on it (independently of the indistinctness of the lines of demarcation) would be as completely artificial and technical as the Linnaean. Our natural groups, therefore, must often be founded not on the obvious, but on the unobvious properties of things, when these are of greater importance. But in such cases it is essential that there should be some other property or set of properties, more readily recognisable by the observer, which co-exist with, and may be received as marks of, the properties which are the real groundwork of the classification. A natural arrangement, for example, of aninruls, must be founded in the main on their internal structure, but (as has been justly remarked) it would be absurd that we should not be able to determine the genus and species of an animal without first killing it. On this ground, the preference, among zoological classifications, is prob...

Full Product Details

9781236432087

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Countries Available