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New species also have been collected in abundance from Tertiary formations of every age, while newly discovered groups of strata have filled up gaps in the previously known series. Hence modifications and reforms have been called for in the classifications first proposed.
Other writers of equal eminence in this field of investigation have not only observed the same characteristics, but encountered the same difficulties in classification, from the very great diversity obtaining even in the nearest allied forms. So great is this diversity, and so multitudinous the different forms, that little certainty or value can be attached to the classifications already made.
Whenever criticism of any art becomes specialised and professional whenever a class of adjudicators is brought into existence, those adjudicators are apt to become as a class distrustful of their immediate impressions, and anxious for methods of comparison between work and work, they begin to emulate the classifications and exact measurements of a science, and to set up ideals and rules as data for such classification and measurements.
If we contemplate the whole field of human knowledge, attained or attainable, we find that it separates itself obviously, and as it were spontaneously, into two divisions, which stand so strikingly in opposition and contradistinction to one another, that in all classifications of our knowledge they have been kept apart. These are, physical science, and moral or psychological science.
Modern philologists have made different classifications of the various languages of the world, one of which divides them into three great classes: the Monosyllabic, the Agglutinated, and the Inflected. The first, or Monosyllabic class, contains those languages which consist only of separate, unvaried monosyllables.
The thoughts of men are incredibly evanescent, merely the foam of their labouring natures; and they doubtless vary much more than our trite classifications allow for. This is what makes passions and fashions, religions and philosophies, so hard to conceive when once the trick of them is a little antiquated. Languages are hardly more foreign to one another than are the thoughts uttered in them.
Is it because he names his plants or specimens with Latin names and divides them into genera and species, whereas the draper does not formulate his classifications, or at any rate only uses his mother tongue when he does? Yet how like the sub-divisions of textile life are to those of the animal and vegetable kingdoms!
Her mother's playing Canada. And this is little Sidonia Vavasour mother out in one of the highest-priced sketches in vaudeville. Know it? 'The Snake. Every morning that God sends comes her good-morning telegram to this little mite, just as regular as clockwork." "I hope, Mrs. Dupree, it isn't going to be too expensive." "Our service divides itself into three classifications, Mrs. ?" "Penny."
We can only now remark that, on the one hand, classifications and nomenclatures have aided science by continually subdividing the subject-matter of research, and giving fixity and diffusion to the truths disclosed; and that on the other hand, they have caught from it that increasing quantitativeness, and that progress from considerations touching single phenomena to considerations touching the relations among many phenomena, which we have been describing.
"Yes, but it's advantage all the same," you will retort. But excuse me, I'll make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every system constructed by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind. In fact, it upsets everything.
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