27 



nos Clarus", and concludes with a short academic dis- 

 sertation by Geringius, which was published in 1727 and 

 publicly discussed in Upsala (with Roberg presiding). By 

 far the most important of the works dealt with is Will- 

 ughby's u De historia Piscium libri quattuor", which was 

 posthumously edited and published in 1686 by John 

 Ray. As that work may be said to have constituted 

 really the only groundwork upon which Artedi was 

 able to base his own studies and investigations, it may 

 be as well to say a few words about it, so as to illus- 

 trate the stage of development to which the science 

 of Zoology had then attained. Ray and Willughby had, 

 we find, got so far as to establish, practically speaking, 

 the notion attaching in science to the word species, 

 and had even come to the point of proposing a kind 

 of systematisation, though the system they put forward 

 is full of faults and is not at all consistently applied; 

 only to mention one unsatisfactory point, it is based 

 on a series of subdivisions so defined that they are not 

 mutually exclusive, one of the other. Nevertheless the 

 work marks a distinct advance, among other things 

 by the fact that the descriptions it gives of fishes are 

 quite detailed and satisfactory. One of the most noticeable 

 faults in Willughby's work was the total lack of any de- 

 finite and precise nomenclature. Thus, the very groups 

 or subdivisions in which the fishes were classed had no 

 exact names, being merely described in long sentences. 

 Consequently, in spite of all the work that had been 

 done before his day, both in the domain of Ichthyology 

 and in Zoology as a whole, Artedi found a very chaotic 

 state of things prevailing when he began to study. As 

 a contribution towards remedying that, is to be regarded 

 the second section of his great work, entitled "Philo- 

 sophia Ichthyologica", for it is concerned with intro- 

 ducing order and clearness into the classification of the 

 various objects with which natural science deals, in 

 place of the confusion and muddle that marked the 

 works of his predecessors. In this section Artedi gives 

 plain and distinct definitions of the various notions the 



