The Influence of Circumstances on the Actions and Habits of Animals

The Role of Art in the Productions of Nature

The ‘artistic parts in the natural sciences’ are 3:

1. Arranging the numerous and varied objects he perceives
2. Making clear distinctions among the immense multitude of these things
3. Hand down to his colleagues everything which he has learned, noticed, and thought about them

These are not the laws and acts of nature herself.

In the natural sciences, we must distinguish between what art and law

This leads to 2 interests:

1. The economic or pleasurable

This is from the economic and pleasurable needs of human beings relative to the productions of nature which they wish to use to serve their own ends.

This manifests as a person being interested only in those things which are useful to him.

The economic and pleasurable needs leads people to imagine in succession the different artistic parts used in the natural sciences.

When we reach a stage where we are thoroughly interested in learning about and understanding nature, these artistic parts still offer us help in this study.

Thus, these same artistic parts are indispensably useful, whether to help us with the knowledge of particular things or to assist us in the study and the advancement of natural sciences, or finally to enable us to keep track of where we are in the midst of the enormous quantity of different things which are the basis of the main study.

2. The philosophical

This is very different from the economic.

This makes us want to know nature herself in each of her productions in order to:

• grasp her progress, laws, operations
• give us an idea of all that she has created

This provides the knowledge for the naturalist.

Few people have this point of view.

Such people take an equal interest in all the natural productions which they can observe.

The philosophical interest forces us to:

• separate everything which belongs to art from what is the exclusive property of nature herself
• limit the considerations of the economic
  • This is to attach to the economic all the importance which they deserve

In the natural sciences, the artistic parts are:

1. the systematic distributions
2. the classes
3. the orders
4. the families
5. the genera
6. the nomenclature

These groups are the products of the art we must use to arrange the different natural things we study.

Nature has never made anything like this.

Finally we must determine what we call the species and assign special names to these various sorts of things.

These classifications are entirely artificial tools.

Systematic Distributions

These are all series of animals or plants which do not conform to the order of nature.

They do not represent a part or the entire order. Consequently, they are not founded on a consideration of well established interrelationships.

An order established by nature exists in her productions in each kingdom of living things.

This order is the one according to which each of these bodies was originally formed.

This same order is unique, essentially without division in each organic kingdom, and can be known to us with the aid of an understanding of the particular and general interrelationships which hold among the different things which are the parts of these kingdoms.

Living things which come at the two extremities of this order have, in essence, the least interrelationship and display in their organic structure and their form the greatest possible differences.

This very order is the one which must replace, to the extent that we understand it, these systematic or artificial distributions which we have been forced to create in order to organize in a convenient way the different natural bodies which we have observed.

In fact, with these various organic bodies, recognized by observation, at first we thought only of the usefulness and the ease of distinctions among them, and, so far as their distribution is concerned, we have taken so long to study the order of nature herself, that we did not even suspect its existence.

Hence have arisen all sorts of classifications, artificial systems and methods, based upon such arbitrary considerations, that these distributions change their principles and their natures almost as frequently as authors preoccupy themselves with the subject.

With the plants, the sexual system of Linnaeus offers a general systematic distribution.

and so far as the insects are concerned, the entomology of Fabricius offers a particular systematic distribution.

Among the plants, the natural method is extremely difficult to establish because of:

• the obscurity of the characteristics of their inner organic structure
• the many differences between plants

Since the scholarly observations of Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, we have taken a giant step in botany in the direction of the natural method.

Numerous families have been formed by taking the interrelationships into account.

But a firm determination of the general arrangement of all the families among themselves, and thus the general arrangement of the entire order, remains to be done.

In truth, we have found the start of this order, but the middle and especially the end of it are still quite arbitrary.

The situation is not the same so far as animals are concerned.

Their organic structure, much more pronounced, presents different systems which are easier to grasp.

This has allowed work on them to move further ahead.

In addition, the very order of nature, in the animal kingdom, is now sketched out in its principal groups in a stable and satisfactory way.

Only the limits of the classes, their orders, families, and genera are still dealt with arbitrarily.

If systematic distributions among the animals are still made, these distributions, at least, are only particular, like those for things which belong to one class. Thus, up to the present, the distributions which we have made of the fish and the birds are still systematic distributions.

In dealing with living things, the more one goes down from the general to the particular, the less essential are the characteristics which serve for the determination of interrelationships, and thus the more difficult it is to come across the very order of nature.

Classes

This is given to the first type of general divisions established in a kingdom.

The other divisions made among these classes then receive other names. We will mention that in a moment.

The more advanced our understanding of the interrelationships among the things making up a kingdom becomes, the more the classes established for the initial division of this kingdom are good and appear natural, if, in forming them, one had classes which destroyed the hierarchy and the simplicity of the divisions which Linnaeus proposed in his example and which have been generally adopted.

The diversity of things which belong to a class, whether of animals or plants, is sometimes so large that it is then necessary to establish many divisions and sub-divisions among the objects of this class.

But science wants the artistic part to be always as simple as possible, in order to facilitate study.

This interest allows all the necessary divisions and sub-divisions.

But it is opposed to all the divisions and subdivisions having special designations.

It is necessary to set a limit to the abuses of nomenclature. Without such a limit, nomenclature would become a more difficult subject to understand than the very things which one ought to be considering.