v.] INVENTORY OF NATURE. 139 



which we call Nature. This desire began to express it- 

 self soon after the Restoration of Knowledge, and, upon 

 the side of plants, the earliest distinct record of it is in 

 those naive, ponderous and cyclopedic works which we 

 call herbals. These writings culminated in the concise 

 and scientific attempts to delineate and classify all 

 natural objects, of which the works of LinnsBus are the 

 'listoric examples. Linnaeus and his editors worked upon 

 ihe plan of an inventory of nature, or a species of book- 

 keeping, and this idea, so far as the vegetable kingdom is 

 concerned, did not die out until the discontinuation of 

 De Candolle's Prodromus after the middle of the present 

 century. This task of enumerating all species of living 

 things was less onerous to the old systematic naturalists 

 than to ourselves, for it was not then supposed that the 

 organic creation is anything like so extensive as we now 

 know it to be. Biberg, writing in 1749 in Linnaeus' 

 "Amoenitates Academicae," estimates "the whole sum 

 of the species of living creatures ' ' to be about forty 

 thousand. Of these, twenty thousand were supposed to 

 be vegetables, three thousand worms, twelve thousand 

 insects, two hundred amphibious animals, twenty -six 

 hundred fishes, two thousand birds, and two hundred 

 quadrupeds. We now know that the species of single 

 classes run up into the hundreds of thousands. Of 

 flowering plants, about one hundred and twenty -five 

 thousand accepted species are described, and it is esti- 

 mated that only about half the existing species are 

 known. The flowerless plants probably far outnumber 

 the flowering plants. Of insects, something like two 

 hundred and fifty thousand are described, and it is 

 probable that less than a tenth of the existing species 

 are known. Riley concludes that "to say that there are 



