The Genus, Genera

The Genus, Genera

This is groups of races, called species, brought together by considering their interconnections.

This is a small limited series by the characteristics with which one chooses arbitrarily to define them.

When a genus is created well, all the races or species which it includes are similar in their most essential and most numerous characteristics.

They must be ranked naturally one beside the other, without differences amongst them except by less important characteristics sufficient to distinguish them.

Thus, well-constructed genera are really small families, i.e., true parts of the very order of nature.

Authors can vary my grouping of families in their limits and extent.

Each of the genera demand a name.

Each variation in a genre leads to a change in the name.

The constant changes in the genera harm the advancement of the natural sciences by:

• creating cumbersome synonyms
• overloading the nomenclature
• making the study of these sciences difficult and disagreeable

When will naturalists consent to a common agreement in order to regulate themselves in a uniform way in the establishment of genera, and so on?

• They are seduced by the natural interconnections between the compared objects.
• Almost all of them still think that the genera, families, orders and classes which they establish are really in nature.

They realize that the good series which they form with the aid of studying interrelationships are really in nature as the large or small portions of nature’s order.

• The lines of separation which divide one part of the natural order from another are not at all natural.

Thus, the genera, families, various sections, orders, and even the classes are really parts of art, however natural the well formed series which make up the different groups may be.

The creation of any one of them must be subject to principles, rules agreed to.

Nomenclature

Here we are concerned with the sixth of the artistic practices which we must use for the advancement of the natural sciences.

We call nomenclature the system of names which we assign, whether to particular things, like each race or species of living things, or to different groups of these things, like each genus, family, and class.

In order to designate clearly the object of our nomenclature, which includes only the names given to species, genera, families and classes, we must distinguish nomenclature from the other artistic practice which we call technology, the latter being uniquely relevant to the denominations we assign to the parts of natural bodies.

“All the discoveries, all the observations of naturalists would necessarily fall into oblivion and be lost for society’s use, if the things which they observed and sorted out had not received a name which could serve to designate them immediately, when we talk about them or refer to them.” (Dict. De Botanique, art. Nomenclature)

Nomenclature in natural history is an artistic practice.

It is a means which we have had to use to fix our ideas concerning the natural productions we observe and to communicate either these ideas or our observations concerning the objects with which these ideas deal.

This artistic practice must be subjected, like the others, to agreed-upon and universally followed rules. But I must note that the abuses which it manifests everywhere in the uses to which it has been put and of which we have so many reasons to complain, arise mainly from those which were introduced and which still daily multiply in the other artistic practices already referred to.

There is a lack of agreed rules on the formation of genera.

families and even classes exposes these artistic practices to all sorts of arbitrary variations, the nomenclature has gone through a series of changes without limits.

It can never be fixed as long as this lack remains, and the number of synonyms, already immense, will always increase and will become more and more incapable of fixing such a disorder, which cancels all scientific advantages.

If we had considered that all the lines of separation which we can trace in the series of objects which make up one of the kingdoms of living things are really artificial, except those which result from gaps needing to be filled, none of this would have happened. But this point has not been considered; people have not entertained doubts about the matter, and almost every day right up to the present, naturalists have had nothing else in view but to establish distinctions among things.

To reach a point where we could gain and keep using all these natural things within our reach and which we can make serve our needs, we felt that an exact and precise determination of the characteristics unique to each thing was necessary and thus that we had to seek out and determine the particularities of organization, structure, form, proportion, and so on, and so on, which differentiate the various natural bodies, in order to be able always to recognize them and distinguish them from each other. This is what naturalists, through examining objets, have succeeded in achieving, up to a certain point.

“This part of the work of naturalists is the one which is the most advanced. For good reason, in approximately the past century and a half, we have made immense efforts to improve the work because it helped us to understand what was newly observed and to remember what we had already learned and because it had to fix our knowledge of things whose properties are or will be then be recognized as useful to us.

“But the naturalists leaned too heavily on the use of all these ideas about the lines of separation which they were able to get to divide up the general series, whether of animals or plants. They turned their attention almost exclusively to this sort of work, without considering it from a realistic point of view and without thinking of listening to each other, that is, without establishing first convenient rules to limit the range of each part of this large enterprise and to establish the principles for each method of determining things. Thus, a number of abuses were introduced, so that each one changed arbitrarily the criteria for the formation of classes, orders, and genera, and continually published different systems of classification.

Hence, the genera underwent constant changes without limits, and the productions of nature, as a consequence of this poorly thought out process, continually change their names.

As a result, nowadays the number of synonyms in natural history has become frightening, each day the science becomes more and more obscure, and it wraps itself up in almost insurmountable difficulties.

The best human efforts to establish ways to recognize and distinguish all that nature presents to observation and use are transformed into an immense maze which one trembles to enter, with good reason.” Discours d’ouvert. Du Cours de 1806, p. 5 and 6.

There we see the consequences of our forgetting to distinguish what really belongs to art and what is unique to nature and of forgetting to concern ourselves with finding agreed-upon rules to determine less arbitrarily the divisions which need to be made.