 Treating kinds as abstract individuals permits an analogue for natural kind terms to the natural story concerning the reference of singular proper names that emerges from Kripke’s discussion. In the simplest case, an individual receives a name in a naming ceremony, and the use of that name is transferred from speaker to speaker, preserving its reference through each transfer. Thus the reference of a later use is determined by tracing back the route of transmission to the original naming ceremony. In the natural kind case, which is rather more of an idealization than the case of a concrete particular, the original naming ceremony picks out a natural kind via an ostension of one of its samples. This is the so-called ‘causal’ theory of reference. Note that ‘causal’ refers to the causal transmission of the use of the name. (Although an ostensive reference fixing will be causal, the link between the kind (or its sample) and the first use of the kind term could be secured by a reference-fixing description. In such as case the reference-fixing description does merely that; it does not supply a meaning (sense or intension).