ANIMAL CLASSIFICATION— TAXONOMY 79 



family. We, of course, select the latter. We now have narrowed down 

 our animals to a comparatively small group which includes the foxes, 

 jackals, wolves, and dogs. There are only two genera in this family, the 

 fox genus, V id pes, and the dog genus. Canis. There are five well-known 

 species in the genus containing the dog. There is the European wolf, 

 Canis lupus; the timber wolf of North America, Canis occidentalis ; the 

 prairie wolf or coyote, Canis latrans; the jackal, Canis aureus; and our 

 domestic dog, Canis jamiliaris. 



Now our field includes only dogs, but there are quite a number of 

 breeds that show considerable variation — collies, dachshunds, great danes, 

 bloodhounds, and cocker spaniels are but a few of the many breeds. Our 

 particular dog is a cocker spaniel. We can carry the classification to its 

 final division by giving the name of the particular dog under considera- 

 tion. Arranged in outline form the classification would look like this : 



Kingdom — Animal ia 

 Phylum — Chordata 

 Class — Mammalia 

 Order — Carnivora 

 Family — Canidae 

 Genus — Canis 



species — jamiliaris 



variety — cocker spaniel 



To give the scientific name of a dog one w T ould say Canis jamiliaris, 

 thus including both the genus and the species names. The genus name is 

 always capitalized, whereas the name of the species is always spelled with 

 a small letter. The genus is a noun and the name of the species is usually 

 an adjective which describes the noun. In this case, Canis means dog 

 and familiaris means common or familiar. 



When it is necessary or desirable, the name of the man who first 

 described the species may be placed after the scientific name. As an ex- 

 ample, the genus name for a frog is Rana; the bull frog is Rana catesbeiana 

 and this species was first described by a man named Shaw. Hence, for 

 utmost scientific accuracy the name of the bullfrog is written as Rana 

 catesbeiana Shaw. Sometimes the name of the man who first described 

 the species is placed in parentheses, as Terrapene Carolina (Linnaeus) for 

 the box turtle. This indicates that the species has been moved to a 

 different genus after its first description. 



The same species name is often used to describe a number of dif- 

 ferent genera ; hence a species name when used alone does not refer to 

 any particular one. For example, the catbird is Dumctclla carolinensis 

 (Linnaeus) and the white-breasted nuthatch is Sitta carolinensis Latham. 



