A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



tury. New aid to the navigator had been furnished by 

 the perfected compass and quadrant, and by the inven- 

 tion of the chronometer ; medical science had banished 

 scurvy, which hitherto had been a perpetual menace 

 to the voyager; and, above all, the restless spirit of the 

 age impelled the venturesome to seek novelty in fields 

 altogether new. Some started for the pole, others tried 

 for a northeast or northwest passage to India, yet oth- 

 ers sought the great fictitious antarctic continent told 

 of by tradition. All these of course failed of their im- 

 mediate purpose, but they added much to the world's 

 store of knowledge and its fund of travellers' tales. 



Among all these tales none was more remarkable 

 than those which told of strange living creatures found 

 in antipodal lands. And here, as did not happen in 

 every field, the narratives were often substantiated by 

 the exhibition of specimens that admitted no question. 

 Many a company of explorers returned more or less 

 laden with such trophies from the animal and vegetable 

 kingdoms, to the mingled astonishment, delight, and 

 bewilderment of the closet naturalists. The followers 

 of Linnaeus in the "golden age of natural history," a 

 few decades before, had increased the number of 

 known species of fishes to about four hundred, of birds 

 to one thousand, of insects to three thousand, and of 

 plants to ten thousand. But now these sudden ac- 

 cessions from new territories doubled the figure for 

 plants, tripled it for fish and birds, and brought the 

 number of described insects above twenty thousand. 



Naturally enough, this wealth of new material was 

 sorely puzzling to the classifiers. The more discerning 

 began to see that the artificial system of Linnaeus, won- 



100 



