PRINCIPLES OF SCIENTIFIC ARRANGEMENT. 129 
names, which, like our own vernacular names, applied 
rather to groups than to species, and have in conse¬ 
quence ultimately become the names of genera. But this 
was the work of time, with which discovery progressed. 
As these discoveries were made by the new cultivators 
of natural history, they added them to those which they 
resembled, by some brief distinctive character adapted 
to the momentary exigency, such as major , or minor , 
etc.; and these additions were constantly treated as 
varieties of the species, whose name headed the list 
by the designation first adopted. Discoveries still con¬ 
tinued, which were compulsively arranged with the pre¬ 
decessors they most nearly resembled, until resem¬ 
blances vanished, and the boundaries fixed by the as¬ 
sumed correct application of the names thus derived 
from the ancients were passed, and there was an over¬ 
flow on all sides. 
To meet this difficulty, the new discriminative name 
had to be moulded into a phrase to correct its exceptive 
peculiarities, and specific names became descriptive 
phrases, the bulk of which no memory could retain, 
and which usually were neither clear nor expressive. 
Thus genera were continually treated as species, and 
species as numbered varieties, with long distinguishing 
descriptive phrases. 
So it remained till day dawned, and the great lumi¬ 
nary of systematic natural history rose with a bound to 
irradiate the obscurity of science with his subtile and 
vivifying beams. 
This was Linnaeus, to whom we owe the binomial 
system, wherein, by means of two words only (the ge¬ 
neric or surname, and the specific or baptismal name), 
the recognition of a species is perpetuated ; for Lin- 
K 
