I need scarce say how slow and interrupted in both provinces the course of arrangement has been, or how often succeeding writers have had to undo what their predecessors had done, only to have their own classifications set aside by their successors in turn. At length, however, when the work appears to be well nigh completed, a new science has arisen, which presents us with a very wonderful means of testing it. Cowley, in his too eulogistic ode to Hobbes—smit by the singular ingenuity of the philosophic infidel, and unable to look through his sophisms to the consequences which they involved—could say, in addressing him, that
"only God could know
Whether the fair idea he did show
Agreed entirely with God's own or no."
And he then not very wisely added—
"This, I dare boldly tell,
'T is so like truth, 't will serve our turn as well."
We now know, however, that no mere resemblance to truth will for any considerable length of time serve its turn. It is because the resemblances have, like those of Hobbes, been mere resemblances, that so much time and labor have had to be wasted by the pioneers of science in their removal; and, now that a wonderful opportunity has occurred of comparing, in this matter of classification, the human with the Divine idea—the idea embodied by the zoologists and botanists in their respective systems, with the idea embodied by the Creator of all in geologic history—we cannot perhaps do better, in entering upon our subject, than to glance briefly at the great features in which God's order of classification, as developed in Palæontology, agrees with the order in which man has at length learned to range the living productions, plant and animal, by which he is surrounded, and of which he himself forms the most remarkable portion. In an age in which a class of writers not without their influence in the world of letters would fain repudiate every argument derived from design, and denounce all who hold with Paley and Chalmers as anthropomorphists, that labor to create for themselves a god of their own type and form, it may be not altogether unprofitable to contemplate the wonderful parallelism which exists between the Divine and human systems of classification, and—remembering that the geologists who have discovered the one had no hand in assisting the naturalists and phytologists who framed the other—soberly to inquire whether we have not a new argument in the fact for an identity in constitution and quality of the Divine and human minds—not a mere fanciful identity, the result of a disposition on the part of man to imagine to himself a God bearing his own likeness, but an identity real and actual, and the result of that creative act by which God formed man in his own image.
The study of plants and animals seems to have been a favorite one with thoughtful men in every age of the world. According to the Psalmist, these great "works of the Lord are sought out of all them that have pleasure therein." The Book of Job, probably the oldest writing in existence, is full of vivid descriptions of the wild denizens of the flood and desert; and it is expressly recorded of the wise old king, that he "spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall; and also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes." Solomon was a zoologist and botanist; and there is palpable classification in the manner in which his studies are described. It is a law of the human mind, as has been already said, that, wherever a large stock of facts are acquired, the classifying principle steps in to arrange them. "Even the rudest wanderer in the fields," says Dr. Brown, "finds that the profusion of blossoms around him—in the greater number of which he is able himself to discover many striking resemblances—may be reduced to some order of arrangement." But, for many centuries, this arranging faculty labored but to little purpose. As specimens of the strange classification that continued to obtain down till comparatively modern times, let us select that of two works which, from the literary celebrity of their authors, still possess a classical standing in letters—Cowley's "Treatise on Plants," and Goldsmith's "History of the Earth and Animated Nature." The plants we find arranged by the poet on the simple but very inadequate principle of size and show. Herbs are placed first, as lowest and least conspicuous in the scale; then flowers; and, finally, trees. Among the herbs, at least two of the ferns—the true maidenhair and the spleenwort—are assigned places among plants of such high standing as sage, mint, and rosemary: among the flowers, monocotyledons, such as the iris, the tulip, and the lily, appear among dicotyledons, such as the rose, the violet, the sunflower, and the auricula: and among trees we find the palms placed between the plum and the olive; and the yew, the fir, and the juniper, flanked on one side by the box and the holly, and on the other by the oak. Such, in treating of plants, was the classification adopted by one of the most learned of English poets in the year 1657.
Nor was Goldsmith,-who wrote more than a century later, much more fortunate in dealing with the animal kingdom. Buffon had already published his great work; and even he could bethink him of no better mode of dividing his animals than into wild and tame. And in Goldsmith, who adopted, in treating of the mammals, a similar principle, we find the fishes and molluscs placed, in advance of the sauroid, ophidian, and batrachian reptiles—the whale united in close relationship to the sharks and rays—animals of the tortoise kind classed among animals of the lobster kind, and both among shell fish, such as the snail, the nautilus, and the oyster. And yet Goldsmith was engaged on his work little more than eighty years ago. In fine, the true principles of classification in the animal kingdom are of well nigh as recent development as geologic science itself, and not greatly more ancient in even the vegetable kingdom. It would, of course, be wholly out of place to attempt giving a minute history here of the progress of arrangement in either department; but it can scarce be held that the natural system of plants was other than very incomplete previous to 1789, when Jussieu first enunciated his scheme of classification; nor did it receive its later improvements until so late as 1846, when, after the publication, in succession, of the schemes of De Candolle and Endlicher, Lindley communicated his finished system to the world. And there certainly existed no even tolerably perfect system of zoology until 1816, when the "Animal Kingdom" of Cuvier appeared. Later naturalists—such as Agassiz, in his own special department, the history of fishes, and Professor Owen in the invertebrate divisions—have improved on the classification of even the great Frenchman; but for purposes of comparison between the scheme developed in geologic history and that at length elaborated by the human mind, the system of Cuvier will be found, for at least our present purpose, sufficiently complete. And in tracing through time the course of the vegetable kingdom, let us adopt, as our standard to measure it by, the system of Lindley.
Commencing at the bottom of the scale, we find the Thallogens, or flowerless plants which lack proper stems and leaves—a class which includes all the algæ. Next succeed the Acrogens, or flowerless plants that possess both stems and leaves—such as the ferns and their allies. Next, omitting an inconspicuous class, represented by but a few parasitical plants incapable of preservation as fossils, come the Endogens—monocotyledonous flowering plants, that include the palms, the liliaceæ, and several other families, all characterized by the parallel venation of their leaves. Next, omitting another inconspicuous tribe, there follows a very important class—the Gymnogens—polycotyledonous trees, represented by the conifers; and cycadaceæ. And, last of all, come the Dicotyledonous Exogens—a class to which all our fruit, and what are known as our "forest trees," belong, with a vastly preponderating majority of the herbs and flowers that impart fertility and beauty to our gardens and meadows. This last class, though but one, now occupies much greater space in the vegetable kingdom than all the others united.
Such is the arrangement of Lindley, or rather an arrangement the slow growth of ages, to which this distinguished botanist has given the last finishing touches. And let us now mark how closely it resembles the geologic arrangement as developed in the successive stages of the earth's history.
Fig. 1.[4]
