Note 21 — Chapter VII · OF CLASSIFICATION, AS SUBSIDIARY TO INDUCTION.

I say probably, not certainly, because this is not the consideration by which a botanist determines what shall or shall not be admitted as a species. In natural history those objects belong to the same species, which are, or consistently with experience might have been, produced from the same stock. But this distinction, in most, and probably in all cases, happily accords with the other. It seems to be a law of physiology, that animals and plants do really, in the philosophical as well as the popular sense, propagate their kind; transmitting to their descendants all the distinctions of Kind (down to the most special or lowest Kind) which they themselves possess.