30 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



first and "tenth" editions of the Systema and further by the fact that Erx- 

 leben, who revised and extended the Systema (1777), abandoned the ordi- 

 nal divisions entirely and merely listed the genera seriatim. The difficulty 

 of the problem is indicated by the fact that Cuvier, with far better material 

 and more extensive knowledge, was constantly deceived by "adaptive" 

 (or homoplastic) resemblances. Even Cope, who wrote much on homo- 

 plastic and convergent evolution, was himself deceived by the similarities 

 of structure in the marsupial "mole," Notoryctes, and the Cape golden 

 mole, Chrysochloris, an undoubted insectivore. 



The most "inexcusable" blunder of Linnaeus, that of placing the rhino- 

 ceros with the Rodents under the order "Glircs," may have been due, not 

 to carelessness, but to the fact that the Indian rhinoceros has a single pair 

 of close-set cutting incisors in the upper jaw, which oppose the elongate 

 incisor-like appressed canines of the lower jaw and thus show a superficial 

 approach to the rodent dentition. If Linn^us had known that Hyrax, 

 which Pallas described as a Rodent ("Cavia"), had cheek-teeth like those 

 of Rhinoceros, he doubtless might have felicitated himself upon his supposed 

 astuteness. 



In brief, Linnaeus, as fully shown by Whewell,^ from his profound and 

 wide botanical knowledge, was acquainted with many natural orders, and 

 strove constantly to recognize others. He knew that a character of great 

 diagnostic and fundamental value in one order may be of slight value in 

 another; he knew that even in a natural order some of the diagnostic and 

 fundamental characters might be absent in certain members otherwise 

 clearly allied to a given series. He knew that a natural series is "natural" 

 because of the totality of its characters, that the "genus makes the character," 

 and not vice versa, a hard doctrine to many of his contemporaries. When 

 Linnaeus had arrived at a conception of any given natural order, he selected 

 certain characters as diagnostic, but not necessarily universal, and constructed 

 professedly artificial or only partly natural keys to his "natural" orders. 



When Linnaeus turned his attention to the classification of animals, we 

 may believe that he followed the same principles. In this application of the 

 principles gained in one subject to the data of another, we have a good 

 example of the felicitous union of specifically distinct ideas to produce a 

 line of ideas that are new and very fertile. 



The Eelation of Linnaeus to his Successors. 



Linnaeus inherited from Ray and from the scholastic system the dogma 

 of the separate creation and .objective reality of species, which became 



> Op. cit., pp. 319-325. 



