Page - 471 - in The Origin of Species

AFFINITIES CONNECTING ORGANIC BEINGS 471 be natural; for, on the principle of inheritance, all the forms descended, for instance, from A, would have something in common. In a tree we can distinguish this or that branch, though at the actual fork the two unite and blend together. We could not, as I have said, define the several groups ; but we could pick out types, or forms, representing most of the characters of each group, whether large or small, and thus give a general idea of the value of the differences between them. This is what we should be driven to, if we were ever to succeed in collecting all the forms in any one class which have lived throughout all time and space. Assuredly we shall never succeed in making so perfect a collection : nevertheless, in certain classes, we are tending towards this end ; and Milne Edwards has lately insisted, in an able paper, on the high importance of looking to types, whether or not we can separate and define the groups to which such types belong. Finally, we have seen that natural selection, which follows from the struggle for existence, and which almost inevitably leads to extinction and divergence of character in the de- scendants from any one parent-species, explains that great and universal feature in the affinities of all organic beings, namely, their subordination in group under group. We use the element of descent in classing the individuals of both sexes and of all ages under one species, although they may have but few characters in common ; we use descent in class- ing acknowledged varieties, however different they may be from their parents; and I believe that this element of descent is the hidden bond of connexion which naturalists have sought under the term of the Natural System. On this idea of the natural system being, in so far as it is has been per- fected, genealogical in its arrangement, with the grades of difference expressed by the terms genera, families, orders, &c., we can understand the rules which we are compelled to follow in our classification. We can understandwhywe value certain resemblances far more than others ; why we use rudi- mentary and useless organs, or others of trifling physio- logical importance ; why, in finding the relations between one group and another, we summarily reject analogical or adap- tive characters, and yet use these same characters within the limits of the same group. We can clearly see how it is that