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 "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 
