BICENTENARY OF LINNMUS 13 



exclusive of a few minor papers, are comprised in the "Fauna Suecica," the 

 "Museum Adolphi Friderici," the " Museum Ludovicise Ulricse " and the 

 several editions of his " Systema Naturae." The first edition, appearing in 

 1735, was a folio of only 12 pages, consisting merely of a conspectus of his 

 Systema in tabular form. The second edition, published in 1740, was 

 an octavo of 40 pages, in which were added, for the animal kingdom, the 

 characters of the groups. The sixth, published in 1748, was greatly en- 

 larged, the zoological part alone consisting of 76 pages, illustrated with six 

 plates, or one for each of his six classes of animals. The tenth, published 

 in 1758, was in two octavo volumes, of which the zoology formed the first 

 volume, consisting of 824 pages. The twelfth, and the last edition revised 

 by the author, was issued in three volumes, the first of which, containing 

 the zoology and comprising 1427 pages, appeared in 1766. Thus in 

 thirty-three years this work grew from a brochure of 12 pages to a work 

 of 2400 pages. 



The first edition of the Systema was published when the author was 

 only twenty-eight years old, during his sojourn in Holland. He had never 

 previously been beyond the confines of southern Sweden, except on his 

 journey to Lapland and Finland in 1732, and he had had access to no large 

 collection of animals. Thus his resources for such an important undertak- 

 ing were extremely limited, being restricted to his own considerable first- 

 hand knowledge of the fauna of Sweden, to the few specimens of exotic 

 animals he had been able to see in Lund, Upsala and Stockholm, and to the 

 scanty literature of the subject there available. When the second edition 

 appeared, in 1740, he had spent less than three years and a half in foreign 

 countries, mainly in Holland with single brief visits to London and Paris; 

 but his interests on these occasions were botanical and not zoological. 



The sixth edition (the third revised by the author), published in 1748, 

 was in effect a synopsis of the fauna of Sweden, filled in, as regards the fauna 

 of the rest of the world, by compilations from his predecessors. Strange as 

 it may seem, outside of the tropical genera Simia, Bradypus, Dasypus, 

 Myrmecophaga and Manis, this edition enumerates only thirteen species of 

 mammals not found in Sweden. Only 140 are recorded for his whole class 

 Animalium quadrupedium, one-third of which are Scandinavian. 



This analysis could be extended to other classes with practically similar 

 results. The class Insecta, for example, includes only thirteen species that 

 are not also recorded in the "Fauna Suecica," showing how limited was his 

 knowledge of the world's fauna at 1748. 



The tenth edition (the fourth revised by the author), published in 1758, 

 is the epoch-making work in the history of zoology, as in this the binomial 

 system of nomenclature for the whole animal kingdom is introduced for the 



