member of genus number one.
Perpetual quibbling over these matters was quite the order of the day,
no two authorities ever agreeing as to details of classification. The
sole point of agreement was that preconceived types were in question--if
only the zoologists could ever determine just what these types were.
Meantime, the student who supposed classifications to be matters of
moment, and who laboriously learned to label the animals and birds
of his acquaintance with an authoritative Latin name, was perpetually
obliged to unlearn what he had acquired, as a new classifier brought new
resources of hair-splitting pursuit of a supposed type or ideal to bear
on the subject. Where, for example, our great ornithologists of the
early part of the century, such as Wilson and Audubon, had classed all
our numerous hawks in a genus falco, later students split the group up
into numerous genera--just how many it is impossible to say, as no two
authorities agreed on that point. Wilson, could he have come back a
generation after his death, would have found himself quite at a loss to
converse with his successors about the birds he knew and loved so
well, using their technical names--though the birds themselves had not
changed.

Notwithstanding all the differences of opinion about matters of detail,
however, there was, nevertheless, substantial agreement about the
broader outlines of classifications, and it might fairly enough
have been hoped that some day, when longer study had led to finer
discrimination, the mysteries of all the types of creation would
be fathomed. But then, while this hope still seemed far enough from
realization, Charles Darwin came forward with his revolutionizing
doctrine--and the whole time-honored myth of "types" of creation
vanished in thin air. It became clear that the zoologists had been
attempting a task utterly Sisyphean. They had sought to establish
"natural groups" where groups do not exist in nature. They were eagerly
peering after an ideal that had no existence outside their imagination.
Their barriers of words could not be made to conform to barriers of
nature, because in nature there are no barriers.

What, then, was to be done? Should the whole fabric of classification
be abandoned? Clearly not, since there can be no science without
classification of facts about labelled groupings, however arbitrary.
Classifications then must be retained, perfected; only in future it must
be remembered that any class