16 



PRINCIPLES OF ANIMAL BIOLOGY 



animals came to be known. With the use of the microscope, hundreds 

 more became visible. For a long time these thousands of species were 

 a chaos, and with the improvement of the methods of study, and the 

 increase in the number of travelers and naturalists, the number of known 

 animals made the chaos intolerable. Systems of classification were 

 used, but they were superficial and were devised for convenience only. 

 It is true, even the early zoologists knew that the quadrupeds were more 

 hke one another than any of them were like snakes, but no one had a 

 comprehensive system of classification that included the whole animal 

 kingdom. Nor was this the whole difficulty. Animals were often not 

 named, but were known by cumbersome descriptions. Animals that 



Fig. 7.- 



-Carl von Linno (Carolus Linnseus), 1707-1778, in Lapland dress at the age of 

 thirty. {Courtesy of New York Botanical Garden.) 



were common enougn to have received names were differently named in 

 different regions; and the same name was not infrequently applied in 

 different localities to different animals. 



Order has come out of this confusion largely through the initial efforts 

 of Carl vonLinne (or Linnaeus as he is more commonly called), of Sweden, 

 who lived from 1707 to 1778 (Fig. 7). Before his time John Ray of 

 England, had taken one important step, by limiting the meaning of the 

 word "species" to something like its present significance. Linnaeus went 

 further and gave each species a name which, being Latin, could be used 

 the world over. The name of each species was a double one, the first 

 name being that of the genus, the second that of the species itself. Thus, 



