BICENTENARY OF LINN.EUS 15 



The only previous classification of mammals with which Linnaeus's 

 need to be compared is Ray's, published in 1693, whose system, taken as a 

 whole, is far more artificial than Linnaeus's. Naturally there are some 

 striking coincidences of grouping, and in the characters employed by the 

 two authors. As to the latter, Ray so well covered the field that there was 

 little left for Linnaeus to add, since during the interval between Ray and 

 Linnaeus not much was learned about the anatomy and relations of the 

 ordinal groups of mammals. Doubtless Linnaeus was influenced, in his 

 removal of the cetaceans from the fish to the mammal class, by the systems 

 of his contemporaries, Klein (1751) and Brisson (1756), in which respect 

 only are their systems better or less artificial than his. Inasmuch, however, 

 as Brisson divided mammals into eighteen orders instead of seven, he 

 escaped some of the grotesque combinations made by Linnaeus: on the 

 other hand, he gave undue emphasis to relatively unimportant differences. 



Linnaeus's classification of birds is closely modeled upon that of Ray, 

 and his departures from it are seldom improvements. His lack of knovdedge 

 of ornithology is strikingly apparent through his repealed association of 

 very unlike species in the same genus, as where a penguin is combined Vv'ith 

 a tropic bird to form his genus Pha'etlion, and another species of penguin 

 with an albatross to form his genus Diomedea. In the tenth edition he 

 recorded only about 550 species of birds; in the twelfth, this number was 

 raised to nearly a thousand, mainly on the basis of Brisson's great work, 

 which appeared in 1760. The greater part were based on the writings of 

 previous authors ; probably less than one-fourth of them being known to him 

 from specimens. 



His class Amphibia contained four orders, of which the fourth consisted 

 of cartilaginous and other wholly unrelated fishes, and shows how slight 

 was his acquaintance with the lower classes of vertebrates. His first order, 

 Reptilia, includes such diverse animals as turtles, lizards, salamanders, 

 frogs and toads. The snakes formed his second order, Serpentes. 



His arrangement of the fishes was originally based on that of i\.rtedi, 

 whose " Ichthyologia " Linnaeus published while sojourning in Holland, in 

 1738, after Artedi's untimely death by accidental drowning. 



His class Insecta is nearly equivalent to the modern subphylum Arthro- 

 poda, as it includes the Arachnida and the Crustacea. 



His class Vermes was the waste-basket of his system, including all the 

 forms of animal life that were neither vertebrates nor insects, which he dis- 

 tributed into five orders, some of them as heterogeneous in character as the 

 class itself. The second order, Mollusca, comprised all sorts of soft-bodied 

 animals, mostly marine, as slugs, sea-anemones, ascidians, holothurians, 

 cuttle-fishes, star-fishes, sea-urchins and jelly-fishes. The animals now com- 

 monly known as Mollusca formed his third order, Testacea. 



