CHAPTER VII 

 CLASSIFICATION OF ANIMALS AND PLANTS 



123. The Scientific Names of Animals and Plants. The 



student who turns over many pages of any textbook of 

 botany or zoology must discover that the scientific names are 

 quite different from the common ones. Thus our ordinary 

 garden toad is in zoological terminology Bufo americanus, 

 a dog is Canis familiaris, a house-cat is Felis domestica, a 

 honey-bee is Apis mellifica ; and so for all the known animals 

 there is such a double name. Likewise among plants, the 

 spring-beauty is Claytonia virginica, the garden beans are 

 Phaseolus vulgaris, pansy is Viola tricolor, blood-root is 

 Sanguinaria canadensis, and the liver-leaf is Hepatica triloba. 

 These are simply examples, taken at random, of names of 

 some common plants and animals. 



This use of double scientific names is known as binomial 

 nomenclature; and this system of naming was introduced by 

 the celebrated Swedish naturalist Linnaeus,* who lived be- 

 tween 1707 and 1778. It has a number of advantages over 

 any other system of naming. For example, the pansy is only 

 one of many kinds of violets which are known ; and it is very 

 convenient to have the word Viola for all kinds of violets, 

 and then tricolor to distinguish the pansy from other kinds of 

 violets, each of which has its own special name, e.g., Viola 

 rotundifolia (round-leaved violet), Viola odorata (sweet 

 violet), Viola lanceolata (lance-leaved violet), and so on for 

 about fifty species of violets which grow in America. 



* See any standard encyclopedia for account of the life and work of 

 Linnaeus. 



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