Those kinds which include no other subdivisions than the sexes, or
various breeds, are called, in technical language, species. The English
lobster is a species, our cray fish is another, our prawn is another.
In other countries, however, there are lobsters, cray fish, and prawns,
very like ours, and yet presenting sufficient differences to deserve
distinction. Naturalists, therefore, express this resemblance and this
diversity by grouping them as distinct species of the same "genus." But
the lobster and the cray fish, though belonging to distinct genera, have
many features in common, and hence are grouped together in an assemblage
which is called a family. More distant resemblances connect the lobster
with the prawn and the crab, which are expressed by putting all these
into the same order. Again, more remote, but still very definite,
resemblances unite the lobster with the woodlouse, the king crab, the
water flea, and the barnacle, and separate them from all other animals;
whence they collectively constitute the larger group, or class,
'Crustacea'. But the 'Crustacea' exhibit many peculiar features in
common with insects, spiders, and centipedes, so that these are grouped
into the still larger assemblage or "province" 'Articulata'; and,
finally, the relations which these have to worms and other lower
animals, are expressed by combining the whole vast aggregate into the
sub-kingdom of 'Annulosa'.
If I had worked my way from a sponge instead of a lobster, I should have
found it associated, by like ties, with a great number of other animals
into the sub-kingdom 'Protozoa'; if I had selected a fresh-water
polype or a coral, the members of what naturalists term the sub-kingdom
'Coelenterata', would have grouped themselves around my type; had a
snail been chosen, the inhabitants of all univalve and bivalve, land and
water, shells, the lamp shells, the squids, and the sea-mat would have
gradually linked themselves on to it as members of the same sub-kingdom
of 'Mollusca'; and finally, starting from man, I should have been
compelled to admit first, the ape, the rat, the horse, the dog, into the
same class; and then the bird, the crocodile, the turtle, the frog, and
the fish, into the same sub-kingdom of 'Vertebrata'.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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