26 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC 



accomplished enough to entitle him to a piace 

 among the immortals. "He found botany a 

 chaos," says Prof. Thatcher, "and left it a 

 unity." His contribution to science consists 

 mainly in his system of classification and 

 nomenclature. Before Linnaeus nobody had 

 been able, though many had tried, to group 

 and name animal and vegetable forms in such 

 a manner as to rescue them from utter con- 

 fusion. This is precisely what Linnaeus did 

 when, by a happy idea, he adopted what is 

 called the "binary nomenclature." 



This great advance was by no means far- 

 fetched; it is simply an application of the 

 double naming everywhere in use, as in the 

 case of Tom Smith, Fred Smith, James Smith, 

 in which Smith is used to denote the general 

 or family name and Fred or Tom the particular 

 or personal. In the application of this system 

 to species, Linnaeus reversed the order as we 

 do when we enter the names of persons on an 

 alphabetical list, as Smith, Fred and Smith, 

 James. As illustrations we will take the two 

 cases, one from the animal and one from the 

 plant world, selected by Haeckel for the same 

 purpose. The generic name for cat is Felis. 

 The common cat is Felis domestica ; the wild- 

 cat, Felis catus ; the panther, Felis pardus ; the 

 jaguar, Felis onca; the tiger, Felis tigris; the 



