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into the service of science during the past one hundred years in 
such a manner as at times to make it appear almost superfluous to 
preserve original material; but even in cases where verbal descrip- 
tion has been most splendidly supplemented by the work of the 
photographer and the delineator, it is often found by the accurate 
and painstaking student that much is left to be desired. 
But not all descriptive and illustrative work is of the high order 
to which I have referred. Those of us who are familiar with the 
literature of description know well that much of it falls short of the 
highest ideals. A description may be so brief as to be unsatisfactory ; 
or it may be so verbose as to be equally unsatisfactory. Brevity 
was characteristic of the work of the earliest authors. A conspicuous 
illustration of brevity so great as at times to be unsatisfactory is 
found in the writings of the man, whom we delight to honor as 
the father of the modern biological sciences, LINNÆUS. You all 
know how very brief and how utterly inadequate in many cases 
are his descriptions of living things. Only referring now to his 
labors in the field of entomology, it is showing no lack of respect 
to his memory to say that, were it not for the preservation of a 
knowledge of the species he named in the illustrated writings of 
his pupil CLERCK, and the conservation of many of the types of 
the species he described, and which have since been made the 
subject of study by such careful writers as AURIVILLIUS and his 
associates, it would be almost impossible to determine to what 
species the names he gave should be applied. It is only within the 
past week that I have had the opportunity to examine the entomo- 
logical collections of LINNÆUS preserved at Upsala, and were it 
not for the fact that these collections have fortunately survived 
the lapse of years, we should to-day be in a measure of doubt as to 
the whole body of Linnean nomenclature so far as it relates to our 
own favorite branch of the natural sciences. The same remark 
holds good as to the work of « the immortal Swede » in the domain 
of botany. The herbarium of LINN AUS is fortunately preserved in 
Great Britain, and has there become the last court of appeal when- 
ever questions have arisen as to the species to which he applied 
generic and specific names. 
While brevity of description may be carried to an extreme, 
