|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: naturalists, Milne Edwards and Agassiz, that embryonic characters are the
most important of any in the classification of animals; and this doctrine
has very generally been admitted as true. The same fact holds good with
flowering plants, of which the two main divisions have been founded on
characters derived from the embryo,--on the number and position of the
embryonic leaves or cotyledons, and on the mode of development of the
plumule and radicle. In our discussion on embryology, we shall see why
such characters are so valuable, on the view of classification tacitly
including the idea of descent.
Our classifications are often plainly influenced by chains of affinities.
Nothing can be easier than to define a number of characters common to all
On the Origin of Species |
