THE GROWTH OF BIOLOGICAL IDEAS 147 



the versatile Cesalpino; and when he died in 1603, the stage 

 was set for rapid developments in this science. 



Kaspar Baiihin of Basle made a fairly natural classification 

 of the higher plants, using the idea of genera and species, 

 thouoh without Qrivinor them names. That w^as at the bes^in- 

 ning of the century; toward its close Bachmann of Leipzig 

 (or Rivinus, as he called himself) suggested that no plant 

 name should contain more than two words. Half way through 

 the eighteenth century the great Swedish natural historian 

 Linnaeus applied Bachmann's suggestion to both the plant 

 and animal kingdoms, founding the universally accepted 

 principles of the nomenclatinx of organisms. His classifica- 

 tion of larger groups, ho^vever, ^vas defective. It was not 

 until near the end of the century that the first real attempt 

 to classify plants on a natural system was made by Antoine 

 de Jussieu, a member of the celebrated French family of 

 biologists of that surname. 



The first fairly satisfactory classification of the animal king- 

 dom was made by that great comparative anatomist Georges 

 Cuvier in his Le Regne Animal (1816). Cuvier divided all 

 animals into four groups: the A^ertebrata, Mollusca, Articu- 

 lata, and Radiata. With the true mollusks he classified three 

 lots of organisms (the lampshells or "brachiopods," the sea 

 squirts and their allies, and the barnacles), which subsequent 

 research showed to be unrelated both to the mollusks and to 

 each other. The Articulata, again, have had to be dismem- 

 bered into two separate phyla, or main divisions of the animal 

 kingdom, the Annelida and Arthropoda. His Radiata was 

 not a natural group. It contained eight major phyla of the 

 animal kingdom and some lesser groups, the affinities of 

 which are still obscure. 



Cuvier did much to increase knowleds^e of fossil animals. 

 The study of paleontology had begun long before. In 1669 

 that versatile Dane, Nils Steensen— Catholic priest and human 

 anatomist of the first rank— recognized the organic origin of 

 fossils and concluded that the rocks in which they occur had 

 been laid down as sediment in ^vater. Although he could not 



