vii Aristotle on Birds 173 



have a fair chance of finding your book if it were 

 there ; but if there were no such arrangement, you 

 might be wasting your time and temper for half a day 

 before you chanced upon the one you wanted. By 

 far your best chance would be if the books were so 

 ordered that, e.g., one whole case contained poets, and 

 each division of that case contained poets of different 

 kinds, dramatic, lyric, epic, etc., and each shelf in 

 each division contained poets of different languages ; 

 so that if you wanted to find Shakespeare you would 

 look, in the case of poets, in the division for dramatic 

 poets, and in the shelf for English dramatic poets. 

 Since Linnaeus the library, so to speak, of natural 

 history has been ordered and classified in a system 

 something like this. There is a case for birds, there 

 are divisions for the chief orders of birds, and shelves 

 for the minor distinctions of birds, and each case, 

 division, and shelf has its name allotted to it in a 

 language which all the learned world can understand, 

 i.e. Latin ; and for common convenience the names 

 of the divisions and the shelves — by which I mean 

 the generic and the specific names, the two most 

 useful working distinctions in dealing with one kind 

 of animal only — are taken to denote, to be the full 

 scientific name of, each individual species. 



Thus just as you say that a book will be found in 

 division A, shelf 6, so you call a bird Fringilla 

 coelebs, i.e. you mean a bird belonging to the genus 



