Taxonomy in the Jungle

Abstract

THE naming of species and their subordinate groups in laboratories and museums is a familiar process; indeed, it is the process by which the vast majority of animals have been named from the time of Linnaeus, onwards; and it has performed with reasonable success its two main objects, of labelling for convenience the population of the world, and at the same time of expressing degrees of natural relationship. But the demand for more precise methods of delimiting species is often made, and this demand takes two distinct trends, both influenced by the knowledge that species are not self-contained units but are composed of individuals the characters of which intergrade with those of related species. On one hand there is the plea for a statistical analysis of the morphological characters of populations before the risk is taken of dubbing a new species, as in Ginsburg's ‘arithmetical definition’ which expresses numerically intergradation or divergence. On the other hand there is a growing tendency to interpret characters in relation to environment, so that relatively small morphological differences which are constant throughout a habitat are regarded as of taxonomic significance.