THE MODERN STUDY OF ZOOLOGY g 



who has not himself any idea of the subjects on 

 which he collects the testimony of others, and 

 therefore cannot appreciate the truth of their 

 testimonies, nor even always understand what they 

 mean. In short, he is an author devoid of 

 criticism, who, after having spent a great deal of 

 time in making extracts, has ranged them under 

 certain chapters, to which he has added reflections 

 that have no reference to science properly so called, 

 but display alternately either the most superstitious 

 credulity or the declamations of a discontented 

 philosophy, which finds fault continually with man- 

 kind, with nature, and with the gods themselves." 



Pliny's influence on zoological thought, though 

 most pernicious, was sufficiently great to com- 

 pletely outweigh his illustrious Greek predecessor ; 

 and to this must, I think, be ascribed in great part 

 the almost complete gap in zoological literature of 

 any value that extends from the time of the Roman 

 zoologist to about the sixteenth century. It was 

 not, indeed, until nearly the middle of the eighteenth 

 century that a system of zoological classification of 

 any permanent value was proposed. For this we 

 are indebted to the great Swedish naturalist Lin- 

 naeus, the founder of modern natural history as he 

 has been well called. 



The system of classification proposed by Linnaeus 

 was, like that of Aristotle, a morphological one, 

 based on resemblances and differences of structure 

 in the several animals and groups of animals. He 

 divided the whole animal kingdom into six classes, 

 defined as follows : 



