BICENTENARY OF LINNMUS 19 



was quite common to consider the new groups as sections, and to give them 

 merely vernacular names, or, if their authors were bold enough to designate 

 them by Latin names, they were commonly called subgenera. 



It was not till near the close of the eighteenth century that there arose a 

 new class of naturalists, the anatomical school, led by the elder Geoffroy 

 and G. Cuvier, who studied the internal structure of animals as well as their 

 external parts. It was, however, many years before the new systems began 

 to displace or greatly to modify the long-accepted and strongly intrenched 

 Linnsean methods of grouping animals. 



The great advance in biologic knowledge since the time of Linnaeus can- 

 not be easily measured; it can be suggested by noting the fact that compara- 

 tive anatomy, embryology, histology, paleontology, evolutionism and many 

 kindred lines of research, have nearly all had their origin or principal develop- 

 ment within the last century, all converging for the solution of the genetic 

 relationships of animals and the origin of life. Linnaeus, in an oration deliv- 

 ered in 1743,^ held that each species of animal originated from a single pair, 

 citing as incontrovertible proof the Mosaic account of the creation. It is 

 indeed a long look back to the middle of the eighteenth century, when his 

 labors marked a new era in the history of biology. In commemorating to-day 

 the two hundredth anniversary of his birth, we honor ourselves by showing 

 our esteem for the greatest naturalist of the eighteenth century. 



> In his oration De telluris habitabilis incremento, delivered and first published in 1743 

 and republished in 1744, and again in the second volume of the Amoenitates Academicas, in 

 1751, he gives his reasons for believing "that at the beginning to the world there was created 

 one single sexual pair of every species of living thing. 



"To the proofs of this proposition," he continues, "I request those who are my auditors to 

 lend a favorable ear and willing attention. 



"Our holy Faith instructs us to believe that the Divinity created a single pair of the human 

 kind, one individual male, the other female. The sacred writing of Moses acquaint us that they 

 were placed in the Garden of Eden, and that Adam there gave names to every species of animal, 

 God causing them to appear before him. 



"By a sexual pair I mean one male and one female in every species where the individuals 

 differ in sex." — J. F. Brand's translation, in Select Dissertations from the Amoenitates Aca- 

 demicce, 1781, pp. 75, 76. 



