Species

132 Species

and sexual preference enables a biological species to be recognized. His answer was,

its mode of reproduction and growth, its geographic distribution and fossil history,

and the manifold relations that the individual organism bears to the world around it.”^72

A species is, it seems, a description of the overall biological features of organ-

isms, for Agassiz gave the individual organism priority, not unlike Buffon. Winsor

notes further, “[h]is purpose was ... to affirm the reality of all those relationships

of similarity that are expressed in a natural classification.” She quotes him from

the Essay:

Species then exist in nature in the same manner as any other groups, they are quite

as ideal in the mode of existence as genera, families, etc., or quite as real. ... Now as

truly as individuals, while they exist, represent their species for the time being and do

not constitute them, so truly do these same individuals represent at the same time their

genus, their family, their order, their class, and their type, the characters of which they

bear as indelibly as those of the species.^73

Species exist as ideas, which represent the relations actual individuals bear to the
world. They are not things, in the physical sense of the term, so much as what the
things represent (but do not comprise). This is very Platonic in spirit.
In his Methods of Study in Natural History, he further discusses classificatory
categories. In this he adopts a realist view of Cuvier’s embranchements theory as
“being, so far as it is accurate, the literal interpreter of [the plan of creation],”^74 and
“that classification, rightly understood, means simply the creative plan of God as
expressed in organic terms,”^75 but this is at a much higher level than the species level.
He notes in chapter V that the nature of Linnaean Orders is partly arbitrary, that if

one man holds a certain kind of structural characters superior to another, he will estab-

lish the rank of the order upon that feature^76

but overall, he says that higher taxa

stand, as an average, relatively to each other, lower and higher.^77

He is thus a rank realist. He argues that there is no succession between these higher

types,^78 and so there is no reason to think evolution is correct.

In this post-Origin work Agassiz denies that Species are more real than the higher

taxa, contrary to the opinions based upon de Candolle’s views.^79 Species are exactly

as real as these higher taxa:

(^72) Winsor 1979, 98.
(^73) Agassiz, op. cit., 256f.
(^74) Agassiz 1863, 41.
(^75) Agassiz, op. cit., 42.
(^76) Agassiz, op. cit., 72f.
(^77) Agassiz, op. cit., 86, cf. also 109 on Branches and Classes, and 127f on Genera.
(^78) Agassiz, op. cit., 92.
(^79) Agassiz, op. cit., 135.