582 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. IV. No. 95. 



questions that offer for review time will 

 only permit us to examine a few. 



ISTomenclature, in the modern sense of 

 the word, did not trouble naturalists till 

 near the middle of the last century. The ani- 

 mals and plants of the Ancient world were 

 mostly treated of under the names which 

 the Greeks or Eomans had used, or were 

 supposed to have used. The forms that 

 became first known after the discovery of 

 America were introduced into the literature 

 under names more or less like those which 

 they bore among the aboriginal inhabitants 

 of the countries from which those forms 

 had been obtained. Only a few names 

 were coined from the Latin or Greek, 

 and used for forms not mentioned by clas- 

 sical authors. Examples of such are 

 Ammmodytes and Anarrhichas, invented by 

 Gesner. But none of those names were 

 employed as true generic designations. 

 Genera, in fact, in the strictest sense of the 

 word, were not used, by zoologists at least,* 

 till the time of Linnaeus. 



There were certainly very close approxi- 

 mations to the idea manifest in some of the 

 older authors, such, for example, as Belon 

 and Lang ; but their analogous groups were 

 not strictly defined and limited, as the gen- 

 era of Linnseus and his followers were. 

 The system has been one of slow growth, 

 and has developed in accordance with our 

 knowledge of Nature, and in response to 

 the need for expressing the various degrees 

 of complication of the organisms. The 

 species known to the naturalists of early 

 times were few in number — at least, com- 

 parativelj^— and the old students had no 



Sciences ; Dr. Dall, representing the Smithsonian Insti- 

 tution ; Prof. Cope, representing the Society of Ameri- 

 can Naturalists ; Prof. Wright, representing the Eoyal 

 Society of Canada ; Prof. Packard, representing the 

 American Association for the Advancement of Sci- 

 ence. ' ' ( New note. ) 



*The genera of plants in Tournefort's work are 

 perfectly regular, as well as defined and illustrated, 

 hut the nomenclature is certainly not hinomial. 



idea of the excessive diversity of form and 

 structure familiar to us. 



A census of animals and plants was 

 taken by Ray, shortly before Linnseus com- 

 menced his career, and enumerated less 

 than 4,000 animals, exclusive of insects ; 

 and of those it was estimated that there 

 were about ' 20,000 in the whole world.' 

 He evidently believed that the entire num- 

 ber Jiving would not be found greatly to 

 exceed this. But let Eay speak for himself. 



According to the author's classification, 

 animals were divided into four orders — 

 'beasts, birds, fishes and insects.' The 

 number of' beasts, including also serpents, 

 that had been accurately described, he esti- 

 mated at not above 150, adding that, ac- 

 cording to his belief, ' not many that are of 

 any considerable bigness, in the known re- 

 gions of the world, have egcapfed the cog- 

 nizance of the curious.' (At the present 

 day, more than 7,000 species of ' beasts,' 

 reptiles, and amphibians have been de- 

 scribed.*) ''The number of birds ' may be 

 near 500 ; and the number of fishes, seclud- 

 ing shell-fish, as many ; but, if the shell-fish be 

 taken in, more than six times the number.' 

 As to the species remaining undiscovered, 

 he supposed ' the whole sum of beasts and 

 birds to exceed by a third part, and fishes 

 by one-half, those known.' The number of 

 insects — that is, of animals not included in 

 the above classes — he estimated at 2,000 in 

 Britain alone, and 20,000 in the whole 

 world. The number of plants described in 

 Bauhin's ' Pinax ' was 6,000; and our au- 

 thor supposed that '' there are in the world 

 more than triple that number ; there being 

 in the vast continent of America as great a 

 variety of species as with us, and yet but 

 few common to Europe, or perhaps Africk 



*In a recent estimate of described species, 2,500 

 species of manmals are enumerated and 4, 400 species of 

 reptiles and amphibians — the several classes thus ag- 

 gregating 6,900 ; this is probably an underestimate. 

 P. Z. S., 1896, 306. (New note.) 



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