10 
The Queensland Naturalist, 
VoL. L 
in his books referred to ; and to honour those names that 
lie bestowed or adopted ; deciding to repudiate and discard 
all others by which different kinds of animals or plants were 
designated, in the publications of previous investigators ; 
■creating thus a la'vv of priority (for nranes of specks), stopping 
in its 'retrospective effect at the issues — of 1756 and 1758 
respectively — of these two above-mentioned epoch-making 
works of Linnaeus. 
Lixx^us AS A Concise Describer of Animal and Plant 
Forms. 
Now in addition to the system of naming alluded to, 
Linnaeus may also be said to have inaugurated the method 
of precise description as applied to living things. 
The great anatomist of the last century, Sir Richard 
Owen, after uttering the truism that “ the best workman 
uses the best tools,” adds, “ Terms are the tools of the 
teacher, and only an inferior hand persists in toiling with a 
clumsy instrument when a better one lies within his reach,” 
and— himself a master of accurate and concise expression — 
described Lmnseus as one ‘‘ to whom mainly is due the 
discernment of the powerful instrument of well-defined 
terms in acquiring a systematic science of nature, and to 
■whom we owe the best knowdedge of its use.” — (Com- 
parative Anatomy of Vertebrate Animals, Vol. I„ p. XVIII), 
A comparison of the wordy and puerile descriptions 
of plants given by Leonard Fuchsius — or by the botanists 
of the seventeenth century, with these of Linnaeus, will 
serve to emphasise this character of the latter’s work. 
And one may recall the fact that Rabellais, a contemporary 
of Fuchsius, in his well-known satire, “ Pantagruel,” found 
it necessary to ridicule these ponderous descriptions that 
confronted the reader of new botanical works of his age, 
by giving a like account of a plant that he styled Panta- 
gruelium, that he concluded with the statement — in harmony 
with the remainder of the description — that it should be 
sown when the swallows first appeared and harvested 
when the song of the cicada was heard in the land. 
Reverting to the precision characterising the Linnean 
descriptions, it may be mentioned that the Botanical Con- 
gress referred to agreed to associate with the genera, the 
names of which appear in the “ Species Plantarum'' that 
botanists are pledged to honour, the descriptions of them 
given by him also in his Genera Plantarum (5 Ed., 1754). 
Tims indicating how -YV'eH, after a lapse of 200 years, his 
definitions of plant genera were appreciated, and what 
adequate ones they really were. The priniciples that 
guided him in this work were already enunciated by Linnseus 
