[20] Hist. Sc. Id. ii. 120-122.
[21] I say probably, not certainly, because this is not the consideration by which a botanist determines what shall or shall not be admitted as a species. In natural history those objects belong to the same species, which are, or consistently with experience might have been, produced from the same stock. But this distinction, in most, and probably in all cases, happily accords with the other. It seems to be a law of physiology, that animals and plants do really, in the philosophical as well as the popular sense, propagate their kind; transmitting to their descendants all the distinctions of Kind (down to the most special or lowest Kind) which they themselves possess.
[22] Nov. Org. Renov. p. 274.
[23] Hist. Sc. Id. i. 133.
[24] Dr. Whewell, in his reply (Philosophy of Discovery, p. 270) says that he "stopped short of, or rather passed by, the doctrine of a series of organized beings," because he "thought it bad and narrow philosophy." If he did, it was evidently without understanding this form of the doctrine; for he proceeds to quote a passage from his "History," in which the doctrine he condemns is designated as that of "a mere linear progression in nature, which would place each genus in contact only with the preceding and succeeding ones." Now the series treated of in the text agrees with this linear progression in nothing whatever but in being a progression.
It would surely be possible to arrange all places (for example) in the order of their distance from the North Pole, though there would be not merely a plurality, but a whole circle of places at every single gradation in the scale.
BOOK V.
ON FALLACIES.
"Errare non modo affirmando et negando, sed etiam sentiendo, et in tacitâ hominum cogitatione contingit."—Hobbes, Computatio sive Logica, ch. v.