Darwiniana : essays / by Thomas H. Huxley.

  • Thomas Henry Huxley
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

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    physiological characteristics of species, and I not only think that they are competent to account for them, but I think that they account for many things which otherwise remain wholly unaccount- able and inexplicable, and I may say incompre- hensible. For a full exposition of the grounds on which this conviction is based, I must refer you to Mr. Darwin's work; all that I can do now is to illustrate what I have said by two or three cases taken almost at random. I drew your attention, on a previous evening, to the facts which are embodied in our systems of Classification, which are the results of the examin- ation and comparison of the different members of the animal kingdom one with another. I men- tioned that the whole of the animal kingdom is divisible into five sub-kingdoms ; that each of these sub-kingdoms is again divisible into provinces; that each province may be divided into classes, and the classes into the successively smaller groups, orders, families, genera, and species. Now, in each of these groups the resemblance in structure among the members of the group is closer in proportion as the group is smaller. Thus, a man and a worm are members of the animal kingdom in virtue of certain apparently slight though really fundamental resemblances which they present. But a man and a fish are members of the same sub-kingdom Vcrtcbrata, because they are much more like one another than either of them
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