June 21, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



959 



fishes. The animals now commonly known 

 as Mollusca formed his third order Tes- 

 taeea. 



It is not, however, just to judge Lin- 

 nffius's wox'k by the standards of to-day. 

 The above comparison of the zoological 

 part of the 'Systema Naturee' with our 

 present knowledge of animals is not to be 

 taken as a disparagement; we merely note 

 the progress of zoology during the last cen- 

 tury and a half of the world's history. 

 Linnseus was a bom systematist ; his energy 

 and industry were enormous; his isolation 

 promoted independence and originality. 

 He devised new classifications, and thor- 

 oughly systematized not only the knowledge 

 of his predecessors, but the vast increment 

 he himself added. He inspired his stu- 

 dents with his own enthusiasm, taught them 

 his own advanced methods, and influenced 

 a goodly number of them to undertake nat- 

 ural history explorations in distant and 

 zoologically unknown parts of the world. 



In special lines of research he was far 

 behind several of his contemporaries, no- 

 tably Brisson in respect to both mammals 

 and birds. But he nearly doubled the 

 number of known forms of reptiles, am- 

 phibiaxLS and fishes, and increased many 

 fold the number of species of coelenterates, 

 on the basis of wholly new material gath- 

 ered through his own efforts. 



Disgusted with the needlessly detailed 

 accounts and repetitions that characterized 

 the writings of most of his predecessors, 

 he unfortiinately adopted the extreme of 

 condensation, thereby adding greatly to the 

 difficulties of his successors in determining 

 to just what forms the thousands of new 

 names he introduced really belonged. 

 Many of his species, based on the accounts 

 given by previous authors, were also com- 

 posite, often containing very diverse ele- 

 ments. But this detracts little from his 

 credit. As one of his appreciative biog- 



raphers has tersely put it: "He found biol- 

 ogy a chaos; he left it a cosmos." 



Linnseus's beneficent influence upon biol- 

 ogy was hardly less as a nomenclator than 

 as a taxonomist. He not only invented a 

 descriptive terminology for animals and 

 plants, but devised a system of nomencla- 

 ture at once simple and efficient, and which 

 for a himdred and fifty years has been 

 accepted without essential modification. 



Linnseus divided the three kingdoms of 

 nature into classes, the classes into orders, 

 the orders into genera, the genera into 

 species, under which latter he sometimes 

 recognized varieties. Of these groups, as 

 he understood them, he gave clear defini- 

 tions, but they were in most cases much 

 more comprehensive than the limits now 

 assigned to groups of corresponding rank. 

 His genera correspond in some cases to 

 groups now termed orders, and frequently 

 to the modern idea of family ; in some cases 

 they contained species now placed in sep- 

 arate orders. Prior to Linnseus, these 

 groups had less definite significance, and 

 were often designated by a phrase instead 

 of a single word. Species were indicated 

 only by a cumbersome diagnosis, intended 

 to express their chief distinctive characters. 

 For this Linnceus substituted a single word, 

 an innovation the merits of which were at 

 once almost universally recognized. But 

 Linnceus reached this solution of a grave 

 inconvenience somewhat slowly, and not till 

 1753 did he fully adopt the nomen triviale, 

 when he introduced it into botany in his 

 'Species Plantarum, ' which is taken by 

 botanists as the point of departure for the 

 binomial system. In the following year, 

 1754, he introduced it into zoology, using 

 it throughout his 'Museum Adolphi Fri- 

 derici' for all the animals catalogued or 

 described in this superb work, namely,. 39 

 species of mammals, 23 of birds, 90 of rep- 

 tiles and amphibians, 91 of fishes and 64 



