in the least like the lobster.  But other animals, though they may differ a good deal from the lobster, are yet either very like it, or are like something that is like it.  The cray fish, the rock lobster, and the prawn, and the shrimp, for example, however different, are yet so like lobsters, that a child would group them as of the lobster kind, in contradistinction to snails and slugs; and these last again would form a kind by themselves, in contradistinction to cows, horses, and sheep, the cattle kind.

But this spontaneous grouping into “kinds” is the first essay of the human mind at classification, or the calling by a common name of those things that are alike, and the arranging them in such a manner as best to suggest the sum of their likenesses and unlikenesses to other things.

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 Caelenterata 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.