What is the purpose of declaring abstract method?

Abstract Class:

The class which contains the common features of components of several classes, but cannot it be instantiated by itself. It represents an abstract concept for which there is no actual existing expression. For instance, "Vegetation" is an abstract class - there is no such real, real thing as generic vegetation. Instead, there are only instances of vegetation, such as mango tree and rose plant, which are types of vegetation, and share common characteristics, such as having leaves and stem in at least part of the lifecycle.

SO in software engineering, an abstract class is a class in a nominative type system which is declared by the programmer, and which has the property that it contains members which are also members of some declared subtype. In many object oriented programming languages, abstract classes are known as abstract base classes, interfaces, traits, mixins, flavors, or roles. Note that these names refer to different language constructs which are (or may be) used to implement abstract types.

We can also say that abstract class is : -- A class which is used only as an ancestor and is never instantiated.

In other Word a concrete definition will say that

A type of class with pure virtual member functions and one or more methods that are declared but not implemented, that behaves as a base class but prohibits the instantiation of any members of that class. i.e. It has a complete interface but only a partial implementation It is used to take advantage of inheritance yet prohibiting the generation of objects that are not completely defined. Concrete subclasses of an abstract class are required to flesh out the implementation by overriding the abstract methods.