August 15, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



243 



fauna outside the Mediterranean region, 

 and it reflects great credit on Maregrav 

 and on the illustrious prince whose assistant 

 he was. 



There were no other similar attempts of 

 importance in ichthyology for a hundred 

 years, when Per Osbeck, an enthusiastic 

 stvident of Linnsus, published (1757) the 

 records of his Chinese cruise under the 

 name of 'Iter Chinensis.' At about the 

 same time another of Linnseus' students, 

 Hasselquist, published his 'Iter Pales- 

 tinum,' the account of his discoveries of 

 fishes in Palestine and Egypt. More pre- 

 tentious than these and of much value, as 

 an early record, is Mark Caterby's (1679- 

 1749 ) ' Natural History of Carolina and the 

 Bahamas,' published in 1749, with large 

 colored plates, which are fairly correct ex- 

 cept in those cases where the drawing was 

 made from memory. 



About this time, Hans Sloane (1660- 

 1752) published his 'Fishes of Jamaica,' 

 Patrick Browne (1720-1790) wrote on the 

 fishes of the same region, while Father 

 Charles Plumier (1646-1704) made paint- 

 ings of the fishes of Martinique, long after 

 used by Bloch and Lacepede. Dr. Alex- 

 ander Garden, of Charleston, S. C, col- 

 lected fishes for Linnteus, as did also Dr. 

 Peter Kalm in his travels in the northern, 

 parts of the American Colonies. 



With the revival of interest in general 

 anatomy, several naturalists took up the 

 structure of fishes. Among these Giinther 

 mentions Borelli, Malpighi, Swammerdam 

 and Duverney. 



The basis of classification was first fairly 

 recognized by John Ray (1628-1705) and 

 Francis Willughby (1635-1672), who, with 

 other and varied scientific discoveries, un- 

 dertook, in the 'Historia Piseium,' pub- 

 lished in Oxford in 1686, to bring order out 

 of the confusion left by their predecessors. 

 This work, edited by Ray after 'WiUughby 's 



death, is ostensibly the work of Willughby 

 with additions by Ra3^ In this work 420 

 species were recorded, 180 of these being 

 actually examined by the authors, and the 

 arrangement chosen by them paved the 

 way to a final system of nomenclature. 



Direct efforts in this direction, with a 

 fairly clear recognition of genera as well 

 as species, were made by Lorenz Theodor 

 Gronow, called Gronovius, a German nat- 

 uralist of much acumen, and by Jacob 

 Theodor Klein (1685-1757), whose work, 

 'Historia Naturalis Piseium,' published 

 about 1745, is of less importance, not being 

 much of an advance over the catalogue of 

 Rondelet. 



Far greater than any of these investiga- 

 tors was he who has been justly called 

 the father of ichthyology, Petrus Artedi 

 (1705-1734). 



He was born in Sweden, was a fellow stu- 

 dent of Linnreus at Upsala, and devoted 

 his short life wholly to the study of fishes. 

 He went to Holland to examine the collec- 

 tion of East and West Indian fishes of a 

 rich Dutch merchant in Amsterdam, named 

 Seba, and'there at the age of twenty-nine 

 he was, by accident, drowned in one of the 

 canals. ' His manuscripts were fortunately 

 rescued by an Englishman, Cliffort,' and 

 they were edited and published by Linnseus 

 in a series of five parts or volumes. 



Artedi divided the classes of fishes into 

 orders, and these orders again into genera, 

 the genera into species. The name of 

 each species consisted of that of the genus 

 with a descriptive phrase attached. This 

 cumbersome system, called polynomial, was 

 a great advance on the shifting vernacular, 

 which in the works of Artedi, Gronow, 

 Klein and others, it was now replacing. 

 But the polynomial system as a system 

 was of short duration. Linnasus soon sub- 

 stituted for it the very convenient binomial 

 system which has now endured for 150 



