64 NATURAL HISTORY 



serve to indicate the necessity for the use of Latin scientific names in 

 classification. There may be other members of the genus Esox, but 

 there is only one niger, although varieties of the same are possible in 

 different environments. The terms of genus and species were intro- 

 duced to the scientific world in the middle of the 18th century by 

 Carl von Linn^ (1707-1777), of Sweden. 



The study of classification is called Taxonomy and is subdivided 

 into zoological taxonomy, or Systematic Zoology, and botanical taxon- 

 omy, or Systematic Botany. 



Early Contributions to Classification 



In order to secure an idea of the development of taxonomy it is 

 necessary to go back several hundred years to some of the earlier 

 biologists and glance at a few of the contributions of these students. 

 Obviously such an excursion can hope to touch upon only a few of 

 the more important workers. Logically, one should go all the way 

 back to Aristotle's time, but lack of space forbids such an interesting 

 excursion. Consequently we must confine ourselves to the immediate 

 forerunners of Linne, or Linnaeus as he came to be called, who intro- 

 duced the concept of binomial nomenclature and with it a more ade- 

 quate idea of genus and species. 



In 1576, Matthias de TObel published an important work on plants. 

 This was an attempt to arrange plants according to their structure. 

 He took the shape of the leaf as the basis for this classification, and it 

 led him to put such things as ferns in the same group with trees because 

 the fronds of the fern bore a superficial resemblance to the needles 

 of the hemlock. Another botanist was the Swiss, Kasper Bauhin 

 (1560-1624), who described in order 6000 species of plants, beginning 

 with the ones he considered most primitive. He approached the 

 concept of genus and species, because he grouped together plants 

 which resembled one another externally. 



John Ray (1627-1705) deserves recognition along with Linnaeus 

 as the founder of the science of systematic biology. This enthusiast 

 published a catalogue of British plants in 1670 and later works (1703) 

 in which he introduced and explained the groups of Monocotyledons 

 and Dicotyledons. He also made less extensive contributions to the 

 classification of animals. Some of these he published with his good 

 friend Willughby (1635-1672). Ray gave evidence in his work that 

 he realized the fundamental differences between genus and species ; 

 furthermore, he had the keenness to group together both related plants 



