958 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXV. No. 651 



retrograde change of placing the in- 

 sectivores and the genus Didelphis among 

 the Ferte. The Glires are modified by the 

 removal of the genus Ehmoceros to the 

 order Belluse, and the addition to it of 

 Noctilio, a genus of bats. The order Bruta 

 is the same incongruous association of ele- 

 phants, manatees, sloths and anteaters as 

 in the tenth edition. 



The orders of mammals, as now left, 

 correspond in several instances very nearly 

 with those of our modern systems, notably 

 the Primates, Glires, Peeora and Gate. The 

 Ferce of the tenth edition corresponds to 

 the modern Carnivora, but in the twelfth 

 he made the mistake of putting back into 

 it the marsupials and the insectivores. His 

 order Belluse being essentially the modern 

 suborder Perissodactyla, his order Bruta is 

 the only grossly incongruous association of 

 types. 



The only previous classification of mam- 

 mals with which Linnteus's need to be com- 

 pared is Ray's, published in 1693, whose 

 sj'stem, taken as a whole, is far more arti- 

 ficial than Linnasus's. Naturally there are 

 some striking coincidences of grouping, and 

 in the characters employed by the two au- 

 thors. As to the latter, Ray so well cov- 

 ered 'the field that there was little left for 

 Linnseus to add, since during the interval 

 between Ray and Linnaeus not much was 

 learned about the anatomy and relations of 

 the ordinal groups of mammals. Doubtless 

 Linnseus was influenced, in his removal of 

 the cetaceans from the fish to the mammal 

 class, by the systems of his contemporaries, 

 Klein (1751) and Brisson (1756), in which 

 respect only are their systems better or less 

 artificial than his. Inasmuch, however, as 

 Brisson divided mammals into eighteen 

 orders instead of seven, he escaped some of 

 the grotesque combinations made by Lin- 

 nffius; on the other hand, he gave undue 

 emphasis to relatively unimportant dif- 

 ferences. 



Linnjeus's classification of birds is closely 

 modelled upon that of Ray, and his de- 

 . partures from it are seldom improvements. 

 His lack of knowledge of ornithology is 

 strikingly apparent through his repeated 

 association of very unlike species in the 

 same genus, as where a penguin is com- 

 bined with a tropic-bird to form his genus 

 Phaetlion, and another species of penguin 

 with an albatross to form his genus Dio- 

 medea. In the tenth edition, he recorded 

 only about 550 species of birds; in the 

 twelfth, this number was raised to nearly 

 a thousand, mainly on the basis of Brisson 's 

 great work, which appeared in 1760. The 

 greater part were based on the writings of 

 previous authors ; probably less than one 

 fourth of them being known to him from 

 specimens. 



His class Amphibia contained four or- 

 ders, of which the fourth consisted of car- 

 tilaginous and other wholly unrelated 

 fishes, and shows how slight was his ac- 

 quaintance with the lower classes of verte- 

 brates. His first order, Reptilia, includes 

 such diverse animals as turtles, lizards, sal- 

 amanders, frogs and toads. The snakes 

 formed his second order Serpentes. 



His arrangement of the fishes was orig- 

 inally based on that of Artedi, whose 'Ich- 

 thyologia' Linnseus published while so- 

 journing in Holland in 1738, after Artedi 's 

 untimely death by accidental drowning. 



His class Insecta is nearly equivalent to 

 the modern subphylum Arthropoda, as it 

 includes the Arachnida and the Crustacea. 



His class Vermes was the waste-basket of 

 his system, including all the forms of ani- 

 mal life that were neither vertebrates nor 

 insects, which he distributed into five or- 

 ders, some of them as heterogeneous in 

 character as the class itself. The second 

 order, MoUusca, comprised all sorts of soft- 

 bodied animals, mostly marine, as slugs, 

 sea-anemones, ascidians, holothurians, cut- 

 tlefishes, starfishes, sea-urchins and jelly- 



