Species

Wit, . . . the faculty of imagination in the writer, which searches over all the memory for the species or ideas of those things which it designs to represent. Dryden.

* In the scholastic philosophy, the species was sensible and intelligible. The sensible species was that in any material, object which was in fact discerned by the mind through the organ of perception, or that in any object which rendered it possible that it should be perceived. The sensible species, as apprehended by the understanding in any of the relations of thought, was called an intelligible species. "An apparent diversity between the species visible and audible is, that the visible doth not mingle in the medium, but the audible doth." Bacon.

* In mineralogy and chemistry, objects which possess the same definite chemical structure, and are fundamentally the same in crystallization and physical characters, are classed as belonging to a species. In zoölogy and botany, a species is an ideal group of individuals which are believed to have descended from common ancestors, which agree in essential characteristics, and are capable of indefinitely continued fertile reproduction through the sexes. A species, as thus defined, differs from a variety or subspecies only in the greater stability of its characters and in the absence of individuals intermediate between the related groups.

There was, in the splendor of the Roman empire, a less quantity of current species in Europe than there is now. Arbuthnot.