Species

Species and the Birth of Modern Science 103

Collection type concepts were concerned with how the name of an organism can be

referred to a particular specimen or individual species. Classication type concepts

were those that dealt largely with summarizing or simplifying data, whereas morpho-

logical concepts dealt with the order of nature and its laws (although Paul Farber, who

I am following here, noted that these two were not always sharply distinguishable).^247

The further discussion of types in the nineteenth century in Farber’s important
paper is one of the rst—if not the rst—challenges to the essentialism story,
although he has recently been challenged on his taxonomy of types.^248 Divergences
from the type of a genus were considered terata, or monsters. They were less than
perfect, and could be individual organisms or even entire species. Hybrids were
monsters too, the sense in which Linnaeus classied his hybrids. In somewhat later
thought, for example, for Buffon, prior to the evolutionary period leading up to the
nineteenth century, transmutation was conceived of as degradation from the type. By
the time Owen proposed his notion of the Archetype that was to inuence Darwin,^249
the transcendentalists had restored a Platonic view of types as pure forms, as ideas,
and as essences,^250 but the Aristotelian account allowed only for types as actual
forms. In “pure” Aristotelianism, variation from the type was an accidental differ-
ence, but as with the Linnaean xation of the genus-species level, Enlightenment
biologists were not always pure Aristotelians. Some of them weren’t Aristotelians
at all. Linnaeus himself had asserted that “Natura non facit saltum,” reiterating the
principle of plenitude, at least for genera (although he crossed this apothegm out in
his own copy of the Philosophia Botanica when he found species doing exactly that
in hybrids). This principle owed most to neo-Platonic doctrines of emanation, and
also relied upon the providence and benevolence of God, and it insisted upon com-
pleteness, and a grading from one form to another, as we have seen above.
At the end of the eighteenth century, classications were commonly thought to
be of three sorts: “articial,” “natural,” or biological. I bracket artificial and natu-
ral in quotes because the way these terms are used in the history of systematics is
at odds with the meaning of these terms in other elds (and is indeed inconsistent
throughout the history of systematics itself).^251 Linnaeus felt that he was promoting
an articial classication—one based upon a single aspect of organisms (in plants,
the sexual system). This was a dichotomous single key system based on Platonic
diairesis—each subordinate taxon is distinguished from others in the ordinate taxon
by the possession or non-possession of the key character—winged/non-winged,
two-winged/four-winged, and so forth. This means that many taxa so formed are

(^247) Stevens 1994, 134.
(^248) Witteveen 2016, however, argues that the ruling notion of “type” in nineteenth-century natural his-
tory was, in fact, nomenclatural—the name bearer of the taxon. From this we get “type-specimen.”
(^249) Camardi 2001.
(^250) Desmond 1984.
(^251) See Winsor 2001, 2003, 2004 on the distinction between natural and articial, and essentialist and
typological taxonomies. Winsor calls typology the “method of exemplars,” which is an apt term.
Types applied within species, within genera and within higher taxonomic groups. See also Camardi
2001 for a discussion of the type concept. A useful discussion in the early nineteenth century is that
of Swainson 1834, chapter 3.