RISE AND PROGRESS OF ZOOLOGY. lxxi 



Linnaeus, it must be confessed, carried the 

 art of distribution and the management of 

 characters to such a degree of clearness and 

 brevity, that any person familiarized to his 

 language, may easily find in his immense cata- 

 logue, the name and place of any being that 

 he would observe. The extraordinary influ- 

 ence that this celebrated man acquired, is 

 owing to this facility which results from his 

 arrangement, to the convenience of his nomen- 

 clature, and especially to the care with which 

 he inserted in his catalogue all the known 

 animals of his time. This influence though 

 somewhat despotic, had the advantage of 

 uniting all naturalists under the laws of one 

 common and intelligible language. An advan- 

 tage, the absence of which the student of Na- 

 tural History at present too often feels occa- 

 sion to deplore, when, in consulting the works 

 of different writers, he is puzzled by the diver- 

 sity of terms, and overwhelmed by their num- 

 ber. Every new work he takes up, he finds 

 the necessity of learning a new language ; 

 too happy, if the final result of his inquiries 

 be not an accumulation of names, instead of 

 ideas, a knowledge of epithets, rather than 

 of the qualities and relations of actual ex- 

 istence. 



