EVOLUTION BEFORE DARWIN 15 



and of such parts of animals as could be readily pre- 

 served soon began to accumulate in every great center 

 of Europe. It was only a question of time when such 

 acquisitions must be arranged and classified, but as 

 yet there was no system by which this could be done. 

 The great Swedish botanist, Linnaeus, who lived in 

 the eighteenth century, first taught us to give to each 

 animal and plant two Latin names, the first of these 

 to be the name of the group, known as a genus, to 

 which it belongs, the second to be the name of that 

 sort, or species, of animal. The cat, for instance, is 

 Felis catus, the lion Felis leo, the tiger Felis tigris, 

 and so on. Linnaeus then arranged the genera (plural 

 of genus) into families, and these families into orders 

 and so classified the animal and plant world as far as 

 he knew it. In his earlier years Linnaeus thought of 

 each species as being utterly apart and distant from 

 any other. He believed it had been so from the first, 

 each species having sprung in its complete form from 

 the creative hand of God. In later life he came to 

 show some evidence of the belief in development, but 

 his great work is all built on the idea of the entire 

 fixity of species. 



About this time we find in the writings of Buffon, 

 the French naturalist, many indications of an idea 

 approaching our modern conceptions of evolution. He 

 felt sure the pig could not have been a special crea- 



