scarcely sought except in books, and on that very account was not understood when it was found. Period of Erudition.-Better times at length came, and men began to observe nature for themselves. The three great authors who are held to be the founders of modern ichthyology, appeared in the middle of the sixteenth century; these were Bélon, Rondelet, and Salviani, who all published about 1555. All the three, very different from the compilers who filled the interval from Aristotle to them, themselves saw and examined the fishes which they describe, and have given faithful representations of them. But resembling in that respect the founders of modern botany, Brasavola, Ruellius, Tragus, and others, they resembled them in this also, that they attempted to make their own observations a commentary upon the ancient writers. Faithful to the spirit of their time, they are far more careful to make out the names which each fish bore in the ancient world, and to bring together scraps of their history from the authors in whom those names occur, than to describe them in a lucid manner; so that without their figures, says Cuvier, it would be almost as difficult to discover their species as those of the ancients. The difficulty of describing and naming species so that they can be recognised, is little appreciated at first, although it is in reality the main-spring of the progress of the sciences of classification. Aristotle never dreamt that the nomenclature which was in * Cuvier, p. 17. 3 use in his time could ever become obscure; hence he has taken no precaution to enable his readers to recognise the species of which he speaks; and in him and in other ancient authors, it requires much labour and great felicity of divination to determine what the names mean. The perception of this difficulty among modern naturalists led to systems, and to nomenclature founded upon system; but these did not come into being immediately at the time of which we speak; nor till the evil had grown to a more inconvenient magnitude. Period of Accumulation of Materials. Exotic Collections.-The fishes of Europe were for some time the principal objects of study; but those of distant regions soon came into notice. In the seventeenth century the Dutch conquered Brazil, and George Margrave, employed by them, described the natural productions of the country, and especially the fishes. Bontius, in like manner, described some of those of Batavia. Thus these writers correspond to Rumphius and Rheede in the history of botany. Many others might be mentioned; but we must hasten to the formation of systems, which is our main object of attention. Epoch of the Fixation of Characters. Ray and Willoughby. In botany, as we have seen, though Ray was one of the first who invented a connected system, he was preceded at a considerable interval by Caesalpinus, who had given a genuine solution of the same problem. It is not difficult to • Cuv. p. 43. assign reasons why a sound classification should be discovered for plants at an earlier period than for fishes. The vastly greater number of the known species, and the facilities which belong to the study of vegetables, give the botanist a great advantage; and there are numerical relations of a most definite kind, (for instance, the number of parts of the seedvessel employed Cæsalpinus as one of the bases of his system,) which are tolerably obvious in plants, but which are not easily discovered in animals. And thus we find that in ichthyology, Ray, with his pupil and friend Willoughby, appears as the first founder of a tenable system3. The first great division in this system is into cartilaginous and bony fishes; a primary division, which had been recognised by Aristotle, and is retained by Cuvier in his latest labours. The subdivisions are determined by the general form of the fish, (as long or flat,) by the teeth, the presence or absence of ventral fins, the number of dorsal fins, and the nature of the spines of the fins, as soft or prickly. Most of these characters have preserved their importance in later systems; especially the last, which, under the terms malacopterygian and acanthopterygian, holds a place in the best recent arrangements. That this system was a true first approximation 5 Francisci Willoughbeii, Armigeri, de Historia Piscium, libri iv. jussu et sumptibus Societatis Regiæ Londinensis editi, &c. Totum opus recognovit, coaptavit, supplevit, librum etiam primum et secundum adjecit Joh. Raius. Oxford, 1686. to a solution of the problem, appears to be allowed by naturalists. Although, says Cuvier, there are in it no genera well defined and well limited, still in many places the species are brought together very naturally, and in such a way that a few words of explanation would suffice to form, from the groups thus presented to us, several of the genera which have since been received. Even in botany, as we have seen, genera were hardly maintained with any degree of precision, till the binary nomenclature of Linnæus made this division a matter of such immense convenience. The amount of this convenience, the value of a brief and sure nomenclature, had not yet been duly estimated. The work of Willoughby forms an epoch', and a happy epoch, in the history of ichthyology; for the science, once systematized, could distinguish the new from the old, arrange methodically, describe clearly. Yet, because Willoughby had no nomenclature of his own, and no fixed name for his genera, his immediate influence was not great. I will not attempt to trace this influence in succeeding authors, but proceed to the next important step in the progress of system. Artedi.-Peter Improvement of the System. Artedi was a countryman and intimate friend of Linnæus; and rendered to ichthyology nearly the same services which Linnæus rendered to botany. In his Philosophia Ichthyologica, he analyzed all the interior and exterior parts of animals; he created a 7 p. 58. • Cuvier, p. 57. 8 8 9 p. 20. precise terminology for the different forms of which these parts are susceptible; he laid down rules for the nomenclature of genera and species; besides his improvements of the subdivision of the class. It is impossible not to be struck with the close resemblance between these steps, and those which are due to the Fundamenta Botanica. The latter work appeared in 1736, the former was published by Linnæus, after the death of the author, in 1738; but Linnæus had already, as early as 1735, made use of Artedi's manuscripts in the ichthyological part of his Systema Natura. We cannot doubt that the two young naturalists, (they were nearly of the same age,) must have had a great influence upon each others views and labours; and it would be difficult now to ascertain what portion of the peculiar merits of the Linnæan reform was derived from Artedi. But we may remark that, in ichthyology at least, Artedi appears to have been a naturalist of more original views and profounder philosophy than his friend and editor, who afterwards himself took up the subject. The reforms of Linnæus, in all parts of natural history, appear as if they were mainly dictated by a love of elegance, symmetry, clearness, and definiteness; but the improvement of the ichthyological system by Artedi seems to have been a step in the progress to a natural arrangement. His genera', which are forty-five in number, are so well constituted, that they have almost all been preserved; and the sub Cuvier, p. 71. |