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(1707-1778), the botanist, son of a Swedish clergyman, 

 founded his famous system of classification. Linnaeus' 

 classification held its own till replaced by the modern 

 system, which, by considering all the characters of 

 the organism, tries to place plants in groups which 

 express their natural relationships. 



Linnaeus also turned his attention to the varieties 

 of the human species, having been struck by the 

 obvious differences of race brought to his notice 

 during his wanderings among the Laplanders in search 

 of arctic plants. In his System of Nature he 

 placed man with apes, lemurs and bats in the order 

 of " Primates," and subdivided man into four groups 

 according to skin colour and other characteristics. 



Development in the knowledge of animals was 

 stimulated by the arrival in Europe of rare and strange 

 beasts to grace the various royal menageries. The 

 comparison of different organs, and the study of the 

 functions of different parts of the bodies of man and 

 of other animals, led to a growth of comprehensiveness 

 of outlook, while improvements in the microscope 

 allowed a far closer insight into the problems of the 

 structure and function of the different organs of the 

 body, and soon disclosed the existence of vast classes 

 of minute organisms unsuspected before. 



Buffon (1707-1788), the first of the great French 

 naturalists, was born in Burgundy of a good family. 

 After travelling on the Continent, he settled in Paris, 

 where he was appointed keeper of the Royal Gardens 

 and Museum. Buffon's genius, as well as his oppor- 

 tunity, lay in descriptive work, and his Natural 

 History of Animals has all the merits of an encyclo- 

 paedia. While not consenting with Linnaeus to classify 



