Louis Agassiz - Essay on classification (1857)

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As long as men inquire, they will find opportunities to know more upon these topics than those who have gone before them, so inexhaustibly rich is nature in the innermost diversity of her treasures of beauty, order and intelligence.

Louis Agassiz
Embryology furnishes, also, the best measure of true affinities existing between animals.

Louis Agassiz
Are these divisions artificial or natural? Are they the devices of the human mind to classify and arrange our knowledge in such a manner as to bring it more readily within our grasp and facilitate further investigations, or have they been instituted by the Divine Intelligence as the categories of his mode of thinking?

Louis Agassiz
It is a fact, which seems to be entirely overlooked by those who assume an extensive influence of physical causes upon the very existence of organized beings, that the most diversified types of animals and plants are everywhere found under identical circumstances.

Louis Agassiz
Natural History must in good time become the analysis of the thoughts of the Creator of the Universe as manifested in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, as well as in the inorganic world.

Louis Agassiz
Is there an investigator, who having once recognized such a similarity between certain faculties of Man and those of the higher animals, can feel prepared, in the present stage of our knowledge, to trace the limit where this community of nature ceases?

Louis Agassiz