4 
At present time many class and order names given by Linnaeus have no recognition because the 
International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, now in its third edition, does not use its 
regulations for any hierarchical category above superfamily. 
This is not the first translation of the Systema Naturae. The 13th edition, published 
posthumously in 1789 by Johannes Friedrich Gmelin, was translated into English from 1802- 
1806 by William Turton. The 13th dealt with far more species than were known by Linnaeus and 
included plants. It consists of seven volumes. But any user of the translation of the 13th edition 
should be warned that names contained in it are not necessarily endowed with priority and more 
important, the translation is not specifically the words of Linnaeus or Gmelin. Much additional text 
has been included and the documentation is simply a gross listing of sources, not specific 
literature, and no detailed credits are given within the text. 
In our translation of Linnaeus we have faced a singular challenge which is comparable to that 
which plagues the students of English literature, e.g., determination of the meanings of 
statements that appear in Shakespearean plays. But we must remember that science tries to be 
exact, thus we choose not to try to second guess what Linnaeus meant. If some suggested clue 
is there, we explore it in endnotes, but otherwise we have tried to project exact wording. A 
comment by a major scholar of Linnaeus’s work , the late John L. Heller, reads ”....l think it must be 
admitted that sometimes Linnaeus's Latin syntax was a bit shaky and that occasionally he did 
come up with the wrong word." (1980 Bibliotheca Zoologica Linneana. pp. 240-264 In G. Broberg 
[ed.] Linnaeus: Progress and Prospects in Linnaean Research. Almquist & Wiskell International, 
Stockholm, and Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Pittsburgh). Indeed we also 
discerned flaws in the syntax and our translations may seem to reach a different context than what 
he perhaps meant to say. Obviously the thought processes of early scholars were of a different ilk 
than those of today's sophisticated students, and we have difficulty in trying to reach into the 
depths of the earlier workers' brain cells to understand their interpretations. As trained scholars in 
our fields, classical languages and zoology respectively, we were often brainwashed by the 
information contained in our texts and in our mentors' lectures. But as we have discovered, from 
the mouths of babes, our students, we often hear novel ideas, the spawn of innocence! Thus to 
avoid injection of bias we have tried to be as literal as possible unless we can show cause to be 
otherwise. Where we find or suspect a typographical error we so indicate in our annotations. 
A final word should be said concerning consistency. Linnaeus employed a wide variety of 
words for closely connected ideas. To recreate the intention of the original and to facilitate its 
study, care has been taken to provide different English words for corresponding different Latin 
words. Thus, a dot (punctum) is not a spot (macula) and dark-black ( ater) is to be differentiated 
from black (niger). A frequent term which could have several meanings is striatus. Although we 
think of "striated” as meaning grooved (but one interpretation in herpetology has been 
"streaked"), Linnaeus's application of striatus seems to have been used to indicate stripes or 
keels. In actual Latin "stria" can mean groove or ridge. Thus where he has used such a term we 
have examined descriptions of the animal and determined what actual connotation he must have 
meant. 
Specialist systematists have not been able to unravel all of Linnaeus's 10th, thus many species 
that he named remain obscure and unrecognized. Some have been determined to be other than 
what was first accepted and appeals have been made to the International Commission on 
Zoological Nomenclature to use its jurisdiction to overrule the laws of priority contained in the 
Code so that name stability can be retained for often used though erroneously applied names. 
