Darwiniana : essays / by Thomas H. Huxley.

  • Thomas Henry Huxley
Date:
1893
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Darwiniana : essays / by Thomas H. Huxley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    II all practical naturalists, whether zoologists, botan- ists, or palaeontologists, to say if, in the vast majority of cases, they know, or mean to affirm, anything more of the group of animals or plants they so denominate than what has just been stated. Even the most decided advocates of the received doctrines respecting species admit this. I apprehend, says Professor Owen,' that few naturalists nowadays, in describing and proposing a name for what they call ' a new species,' use that term to signify what was meant by it twenty or thirty years ago ; that is, an originally distinct creation, maintaining its primitive distinction by obstructive generative peculiarities. The proposer of the new species now intends to state no more than he actually knows ; as, for example, that the differences on which he founds the specific character are constant in individuals of both sexes, so far as observation has reached ; and that they are not due to domes- tication or to artificially superinduced external circumstances, or to any outward influence within his cognizance ; that the species is wild, or is such as it appears by Nature'. If we consider, in fact, that by far the largest proportion of recorded existing species are known only by the study of their skins, or bones, or other lifeless exuvia?; that we are acquainted with none, or next to none, of their physiological peculiarities, beyond those which can be deduced from their structure, or are open to cursory observation ; and that we cannot hope to learn more of any of those extinct forms of life which now constitute no inconsiderable proportion of the known Flora and 1 On the Osteology of tho Chimpanzees and Orangs ; Transactions of the Zoological Society, 1S5S.
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