Old Sutural History Books. 
mination of Minerals. He also laid the foundations, in his 
Fors'dk till Mineralogte^ Stockholm, 175B, of the modern system 
of Mineralogy ; he classified the “ Stones,” which included the 
“ Earths,” according to their composition as calcareous, siliceous, 
argillaceous and so forth. 
I T will be seen, therefore, that by the time of Linnaeus the 
outlines of the several Natural Sciences, as now recognised, 
had begun to be manifest, and the one thing wanting to enable 
further and more substantial progress to be made was the intro¬ 
duction of method into their study. This Linnaeus was 
successful in supplying. Arrangement with him amounted to 
a passion, and he delighted in devising classifications. He 
enunciated the true principles for defining genera and species, 
and this, with his adoption of the simple binomial method of 
nomenclature, enabled the daily increasing number of new 
Plants and Animals to be sorted, and provisionally placed, till 
their true affinities were ascertained. 
His necessarily arbitrary classifications have given way to 
more natural arrangements in all the three kingdoms, but the 
underlying method has remained and enabled continuous pro¬ 
gress to be made down to the present time. 
27 
