§ 3. To establish a classification of this sort, or even to apprehend it when established, requires the power of recognising the essential similarity of a phenomenon, in its minuter degrees and obscurer forms, with what is called the _same_ phenomenon in the greatest perfection of its development; that is, of identifying with each other all phenomena which differ only in degree, and in properties which we suppose to be caused by difference of degree. In order to recognise this identity, or in other words, this exact similarity of quality, the assumption of a type-species is indispensable. We must consider as the type of the class, that among the Kinds included in it, which exhibits the properties constitutive of the class, in the highest degree; conceiving the other varieties as instances of degeneracy, as it were, from that type; deviations from it by inferior intensity of the characteristic property or properties. For every phenomenon is best studied (_cæteris paribus_) where it exists in the greatest intensity. It is there that the effects which either depend on it, or depend on the same causes with it, will also exist in the greatest degree. It is there, consequently, and only there, that those effects of it, or joint effects with it, can become fully known to us, so that we may learn to recognise their smaller degrees, or even their mere rudiments, in cases in which the direct study would have been difficult or even impossible. Not to mention that the phenomenon in its higher degrees may be attended by effects or collateral circumstances which in its smaller degrees do not occur at all, requiring for their production in any sensible amount a greater degree of intensity of the cause than is there met with. In man, for example, (the species in which both the phenomenon of animal and that of organic life exist in the highest degree,) many subordinate phenomena develop themselves in the course of his animated existence, which the inferior varieties of animals do not show. The knowledge of these properties may nevertheless be of great avail towards the discovery of the conditions and laws of the general phenomenon of life, which is common to man with those inferior animals. And they are, even, rightly considered as properties of animated nature itself; because they may evidently be affiliated to the general laws of animated nature; because we may fairly presume that some rudiments or feeble degrees of those properties would be recognised in all animals by more perfect organs, or even by more perfect instruments, than ours; and because those may be correctly termed properties of a class, which a thing exhibits exactly in proportion as it belongs to the class, that is, in proportion as it possesses the main attributes constitutive of the class. § 4. It remains to consider how the internal distribution of the series may most properly take place: in what manner it should be divided into Orders, Families, and Genera.