io Proceedings of the Newport Natural History Society. 
sician it may mean one thing; to the mathematician another, 
and to the naturalist a thing totally different from either. 
Even naturalists themselves are not always agreed as to the 
proper definition of the word. 
The first use of the word species in a biological sense 
was by John Ray about the middle of the seventeenth 
century. It was unfortunate that he should have adopted 
this term to designate a group of organic beings, since 
the word had long been in use among philosophers and 
schoolmen and had with them a well-defined meaning. It 
represented an abstract concept which could have no mean¬ 
ing as expressing a category of classification in biology. 
But the word had also been in use among logicians to in¬ 
dicate a definite class relationship among predicables. With 
them a species was a group of individuals agreeing in com¬ 
mon attributes and possessing a common name. It was 
subordinate to the genus in that it comprehended fewer attri¬ 
butes and contained fewer individuals. It was an interme¬ 
diate category between the individual and the genus, and 
by the nature of the case its limits were fixed and definite. 
When, therefore, Ray, and after him Linnaeus, used this 
word to designate a group of animals and plants they 
carried into the new class the old element of fixity and rela¬ 
tionship which inhered in the logical term. The consequence 
of this was that the word bore a false connotation, which 
led to much misapprehension and confusion of thought when 
the question of specific genesis began to be discussed. I 
feel convinced that it is owing to a preexisting idea of the 
logical or metaphysical meaning of n the term species that 
so many theological writers fail to apprehend the meaning 
of such a phrase as “modification of species by descent/’ 
At all events the term is a misleading one on account of 
its ancestry and if we accept it in the sense in which Lin¬ 
naeus used it, the phrase “modification of species,” “origin 
of species,” either by natural selection, or by any other 
factor is a contradiction in terms. 
Of course Linnaeus believed in real species. In his day 
