Applied Systematics: 



The Usefulness of Scientific Names of 



Animals and Plants' 



By Waldo L. Schmitt 



Head Curator of Zoology 

 U. S. National Museum 



It is an error to suppose as many do that classification is an outmoded phase 

 of natural history. It affords a continuing test of evolutionary doctrine. The 

 increasing refinement of biological study requires greater certainty than ever 

 before of the identity of animals and plants used in experimental work. The 

 fact that all organisms are now considered to be part of one great family tree 

 is a challenge to the intelligence and skill of the classifier who must reconstruct 

 that tree. Actually the business of classification has today greater vitality 

 and significance than ever before. . . . 



— Paul B. Sears 



The field of biological systematics is a broad one, and within it are 

 brought together at least a part of all natural-science disciplines. It 

 represents the orderly understanding and the sum total of our knowl- 

 edge of the animal and plant kingdoms. I shall confine myself chiefly 

 to the taxonomic side of the subject, so largely devoted to knowing the 

 scientific names of organisms. However, to name animals and plants 

 intelligently you need to know a great deal about them, their makeup, 

 lives, growth, behavior, and geographic distribution; in short, their 

 biology in the broadest sense of the word. 



* Address given at the Zoologists' Dinner, annual meeting of the American Association 

 for the Advancement of Science, St. Louis, December 30, 1952. Grateful acknowledgment 

 is made to Dr. Paul B. Sears, of Yale University, and Charles Scribner's Sons, Inc., for 

 permission to use as epigraph to this article a quotation from Dr. Sears's book "Charles 

 Darwin" ( 1,950 ) ; to the late Ra.vmond Pearl, of Johns Hopkins University, for a few 

 pertinent words from his address "Trends of Modern Biology," published in Science 

 (1922) ; to Charles Elton for a quotation from his "Animal Ecology" (1927 ; 194S) ; and to 

 Dr. George Gaylord Simpson, of the American Museum of Natural History, for the quota- 

 tion from his "The Principles of Classification and a Classification of Mammals" (1945). 



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