early times of whom record has come to us.

In early days men who traveled into foreign countries brought back
accounts of what they saw. The whole Natural History of ancient times
was filled with the most absurd and ludicrous stories of all sorts of
things to be seen in distant lands. Sir John Mandeville tells tales
almost as imaginative and quite as amusing as those attributed to
Baron Munchausen.

Upon the great awakening of the fifteenth century, with its new study
and its wide-ranging travel, an entire change came over the human
mind. Men who journeyed into far countries brought back with them not
only accounts of what they saw, but, so far as might be, the things
themselves. Collections of plants and of such parts of animals as
could be readily preserved soon began to accumulate in every great
center of Europe. It was only a question of time when such
acquisitions must be arranged and classified, but as yet there was no
system by which this could be done. The great Swedish botanist,
Linnaeus, who lived in the eighteenth century, first taught us to give
to each animal and plant two Latin names, the first of these to be the
name of the group, known as a genus, to which it belongs, the second
to be the name of that sort, or species, of animal. The cat, for
instance, is _Felis catus_, the lion _Felis leo_, the tiger _Felis
tigris_, and so on. Linnaeus then arranged the genera (plural of genus)
into families, and these families into orders and so classified the
animal and plant world as far as he knew it. In his earlier years
Linnaeus thought of each species as being utterly apart and distant
from any other. He believed it had been so from the first, each
species having sprung in its complete form from the creative hand of
God. In later life he came to show some evidence of the belief in
development, but his great work is all built on the idea of the entire
fixity of species.

About this time we find in the writings of Buffon, the French
naturalist, many indications of an idea approaching our modern
conceptions of evolution. He felt sure the pig could not have been a
special creation, because he had four toes, two of which, with all
their bones and their hoofs, are quite useless to him. We now call
these toes "vestigial," and know the pig's ancestors used them,
walking on four toes and not on two, as at present. Buffon believed
there were degenerations as well as developments, and considered the
ape a degenerate