ROLL CALL 63 



and animals. Ray also advanced the idea that fossils are extinct 

 species. 



Linnaeus was born in 1707, the son of a Swedish clergyman. Ho 

 would have been destined to become a cobbler had it not been for the 

 influence of a physician who recognizcnl the lad's abilities. To make a 

 long story short, he finally secured his medical degree, aided in no 

 small amount by the contributions of his fiancee, and eventually 

 became a professor of natural history at Upsala. It seems that Lin- 

 naeus had a passion for natural history and for classifying everything 

 which came to hand. He initiated several changes in the study of 

 systematic biology, many of which are still in use today. 



Binomial Nomenclature 



The most important contributions of Linnaeus center about (1) brief, 

 clear, and concise diagnoses ; (2) sharper divisions between groups ; 

 and (3) a definite, clear-cut system of scientific terminology, known 

 as hinomial nomenclature. These innovations appeared in the 1753 

 edition of Species Plantarum and the 1758, or tenth, edition of his great 

 work, the Systema Naturae. The tenth edition of this latter work is 

 taken as the starting point of zoological nomenclature. Linnaeus 

 divided the plant and animal kingdoms into Classes, Orders, Genera, 

 and Species. This was a great step over the use of popular common 

 descriptive terms, as you can now appreciate if you refer back to the 

 example of the pickerel. However, a big mistake made by Linnaeus 

 was his concept of fixity of species. 



In 1898 the International Congress of Zoology appointed an inter- 

 national commission which drew up a set of rules ajjplying to the 

 divisions of the animal kingdom. Thus classification today is really 

 an expansion of the Linnaean system which now includes in the case 

 of the animal kingdom, for example, the following : 



Animal Kingdom — is made up of 



Phyla — each of which is composed of 

 Classes — in turn made up of 

 Orders — then 



Families — and finally 

 Genera — and 

 Species. 



In the plant kingdom a comparable arrangement is utilized, beginning 

 with Divisions (= phyla). 



