at biological questions of the day
are being fought over. The writer of this notice well remembers
meeting, a few years since, the (at that time) parliamentary logician,
with his trousers turned up out of the mud, and armed with the tin
insignia of his craft, busily occupied in the search after a
marsh-loving rarity in a typical spongy wood on the clay to the north
of London.

But however followed, the investigation of nature cannot fail to
influence the mind in the direction of a more just appreciation of the
necessity of system in arrangement, and of the principles which must
regulate all attempts to express notions of system in a
classification. Traces of this are not difficult to find in Mr. Mill's
writings. It may be safely stated, that the chapters on classification
in the "Logic" would not have taken the form they have, had not the
writer been a naturalist as well as a logician. The views expressed so
clearly in these chapters are chiefly founded on the actual needs
experienced by the systematic botanist; and the argument is largely
sustained by references to botanical systems and arrangements. Most
botanists agree with Mr. Mill in his objections to Dr. Whewell's views
of a natural classification by resemblance to "types," instead of in
accordance with well-selected characters; and indeed the whole of
these chapters are well deserving the careful study of naturalists,
notwithstanding that the wonderfully rapid progress in recent years of
new ideas, lying at the very root of all the natural sciences, may be
thought by some to give the whole argument, in spite of its logical
excellence, a somewhat antiquated flavor. How fully Mr. Mill
recognized the great importance of the study of biological
classifications, and the influence such a study must have had on
himself, may be judged from the following quotation:--

"Although the scientific arrangements of organic nature
afford as yet the only complete example of the true
principles of rational classification, whether as to the
formation of groups or of series, those principles are
applicable to all cases in which mankind are called upon to
bring the various parts of any extensive subject into mental
co-ordination. They are as much to the point when objects
are to be classed for purposes of art or business as for
those of science. The proper arrangement, for example, of a
code of laws, depends on the same scientific c