With Jussieu and Lamarck in the first place, and then with Cuvier, the character had lost its representative function, or rather, though it could still 'represent' and make possible the establishment of relations of adjacency or kinship, it did so not by the virtue proper to its visible structure or to the describable elements of which it was composed, but because it had been related, at first, to a total organic structure and to a function that it could perform in a direct or indirect, major or collateral, 'primary' or 'secondary' way.