64 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



And Linneeus marshaled plants and animals as a general marshals his 

 troops. And just as an army is composed of thousands of individuals, dis- 

 tinguished as officers and privates, formed into companies, regiments, 

 brigades and divisions, so the thousands of species composing the animal 

 kingdom are grouped into genera, families, orders, classes and phyla. In 

 doing this, Linnaeus instituted many minor reforms; for example, his char- 

 acters were given in a definite order, and following the diagnosis was the 

 synonymy, or list of names under which the animal had been described, 

 and works in which it had been published. He was the first to strip 

 natural history of its verbiage, and express himself in clear and concise 

 language, and, had he lived to-day, I doubt not he would have been an 

 advocate of spelling reform. 



And yet, after all, this scheme of nomenclature is but a part of the ser- 

 vice Linnaeus rendered to natural history. It is not merely that his genius 

 grasped the fact that nature was order, and that he devised methods for 

 expressing this order; his zeal in the pursuit of knowledge gave a stimulus 

 and purpose to the study of natural history that it had never felt before. In 

 a way, his influence may be said to have been much like that of Agassiz in 

 the United States, "He imbued [his pupils] with his own intense acquisitive- 

 ness, reared them in an atmosphere of enthusiasm, trained them to close 

 and accurate observation, and then despatched them to various parts of the 

 globe." It was not so much what he knew himself as the enthusiasm he 

 inspired in others, that made him a power felt throughout the world. 



It must ever be borne in mind that nomenclature, or the naming of 

 plants and animals, is not the end of natural history, but only a means to an 

 end, — a fact that many of our younger naturalists are prone to overlook. 

 Too many of them seem to think that the great aim of the naturalist is to 

 write "new species" after as many names as possible, when, to my mind at 

 least, the making of new species is the most trivial work of the naturalist. 

 It is important work, but only a step on the pathway of knowledge. The 

 real problems are. Why do these species exist? what forces have brought 

 them into existence ? and what are their relations with one another ? 



The man who heard an overture for the first time, after listening a while 

 turned to his friend with the query. When are they going to stop tuning up, 

 and commence to play ? So you may wonder why I chose for the title of this 

 address "Linnaeus and American Natural History." The truth is that 

 Linnseus is so intimately connected with all natural history, that American 

 natural history forms but a small part of the whole. And yet Linnaeus was 

 intimately concerned with the development of American natural history by 

 his acquaintance with those men of science who were gathering and making 

 known the fauna and flora of this continent ; and as plants and animals were 



