206 Zoology as Related to Evolution. 



that has gone on to gather all lands into its sweep and is 

 the sole thing remembered now to his credit. 



But Aristotle, like advanced thinkers in all departments 

 of life, even in religion itself, if a great help to progress, 

 was also a great hindrance ; if a mountain to catch long be- 

 forehand the beams of the rising sun, a mountain likewise 

 to throw long afterward a deep darkness over the plain. 

 For two thousand years men lingered in the shadow of his 

 great name, studied what he had said about animals rather 

 than animals themselves, and trembled lest in going beyond 

 Aristotle they should go beyond truth. It was not till the 

 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and with them the 

 advent of Ray and "Willoughby in England, Buffon in 

 France, and pre-eminently Linnseus in Sweden, that the 

 science resumed its growth, one of the many instances in 

 known history of a leaping from mind to mind over whole 

 centuries with hardly a connecting link between, which 

 ought to remove all difficulty about missing links in the 

 ages before history when in accordance with the same law 

 the leap was from species to species and from form to 

 form. 



The great service of Linnaeus (1707-1768) to zoology, the 

 same as to botany, was his well-known twofold one of classi- 

 fication and of nomenclature. He was a new Adam in the 

 Eden of science before whom each of its creatures passed 

 again to be named, a scientific Napoleon in the kingdom of 

 nature, who took its myriad inhabitants as a mob and or- 

 ganized them into the divisions, brigades, regiments, and 

 companies of a vast army, each with its own distinctive uni- 

 form. And though his organization, while serving well on 

 some fields, has proved inadequate for science's advancing 

 needs, his system of double names one for genus and the 

 other for species has been of immense permanent value, and 

 illustrates strikingly the new power that words with fixed 

 meanings have to make charges with, bayonet-like, in the 

 battles of thought. 



The work of Linnaeus was taken up and carried on yet 

 further by Cuvier (1769-1832), the third great name in 

 zoology. A new and vastly improved system of classifica- 

 tion, based on the structure of its objects as a whole, rather 

 than on a single feature of them, was added by him to its 

 growth. The idea of its kingdom as a regular series, scala 

 natura, ascending from zoophyte to man, which had hither- 

 to prevailed, he supplanted with the conception of it as a 



