EVOLUTION BEFORE DARWIN 15 
and of such parts of animals as could be readily pre- 
served soon began to accumulate in every great center 
of Europe. It was only a question of time when such 
acquisitions must be arranged and classified, but as 
yet there was no system by which this could be done. 
The great Swedish botanist, Linnzus, who lived in 
the eighteenth century, first taught us to give to each 
animal and plant two Latin names, the first of these 
to be the name of the group, known as a genus, to 
which it belongs, the second to be the name of that 
sort, or species, of animal. The cat, for instance, is 
Felis catus, the lion Felis leo, the tiger Felis tigris, 
and so on. Linnzus then arranged the genera (plural 
of genus) into families, and these families into orders 
and so classified the animal and plant world as far as 
he knew it. In his earlier years Linnzeus thought of 
each species as being utterly apart and distant from 
-any other. He believed it had been so from the first, 
each species having sprung in its complete form from 
the creative hand of God. In later life he came to 
show some evidence of the belief in development, but 
his great work is all built on the idea of the entire 
fixity of species. 
About this time we find in the writings of Buffon, 
the French naturalist, many indications of an idea 
approaching our modern conceptions of evolution. He 
felt sure the pig could not have been a special crea- 
