Upon the revival of the study of natural history, when learning dawned after the night of the Middle Ages, much difficulty attached to the imposition of discriminative names. The works of the ancients were ransacked, and endeavours made to verify and apply the names they had used. Ray published a vocabulary of such names. But the ancients never studied natural history in the systematic way pursued by the moderns; they did not want the skill, but they wanted the facilities. Anatomy and physiology had not made the progress necessary to aid them in the pursuit, and the assistance all these sciences obtain from optical instruments was barred from them. The names they gave to natural objects were vernacular names, which, like our own vernacular names, applied rather to groups than to species, and have in consequence 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 continued, which were compulsively arranged with the predecessors they most nearly resembled, until resemblances vanished, and the boundaries fixed by the assumed correct application of the names thus derived from the ancients were passed, and there was an overflow 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 luminary of systematic natural history rose with a bound to irradiate the obscurity of science with his subtile and vivifying beams. This was LINNÆUS, to whom we owe the binomial system, wherein, by means of two words only (the generic or surname, and the specific or baptismal name), the recognition of a species is perpetuated; for Linnæus truly says, “_Nomina si nescis, perit et cognitio rerum_.”