PRINCIPLES OF SCIENTIFIC ARRANGEMENT. 129 



names, which, like our own vernacular names, applied 

 rather to groups than to species, and have in conse- 

 quence ultimately hecome the names of genera. But this 

 was the work of time, with which discovery progressed. 

 As these discoveries were made by the new cultivators 

 of natural history, they added them to those which they 

 resembled, by some brief distinctive character adapted 

 to the momentary exigency, such as major, or minor, 

 etc. ; and these additions were constantly treated as 

 varieties of the species, whose name headed the list 

 by the designation first adopted. Discoveries still con- 

 tinued, which were compulsively arranged with the pre- 

 decessors they most nearly resembled, until resem- 

 blances vanished, and the boundaries fixed by the as- 

 sumed correct application of the names thus derived 

 from the ancients were passed, and there was an over- 

 flow on all sides. 



To meet this difficulty, the new discriminative name 

 had to be moulded into a phrase to correct its exceptive 

 peculiarities, and specific names became descriptive 

 phrases, the bulk of which no memory could retain, 

 and which usually were neither clear nor expressive. 

 Thus genera were continually treated as species, and 

 species as numbered varieties, with long distinguishing 

 descriptive phrases. 



So it remained till day dawned, and the great lumi- 

 nary of systematic natural history rose with a bound to 

 irradiate the obscurity of science with his subtile and 

 vivifying beams. 



This was Linn^us, to whom we owe the binomial 

 system, wherein, by means of two words only (the ge- 

 neric or surname, and the specific or baptismal name), 

 the recognition of a species is perpetuated ; for Lin- 



