In the eighteenth century Linné drew up, for the first time, a great catalogue of plant and animal species. Each species had a solid Latin name, and was provided with its particular label, by which every representative of the species could be recognised at once. Then the species were bracketed together in larger groups, and a general system was formed. It was an immense scientific advance, and is still generally appreciated as such. But we have to make one reserve. It is not man that separates things; nature, or rather God who created nature, has already distinguished them. In this respect zoology and botany are of God. The various species of plants and animals are something firmly established by God. Take the polar bear, the hippopotamus, the giraffe, or a particular species of palm, or vine, or rose. There they are, and all that man has to do is to learn their specific characters in order to determine and name them. Behind all this we really have the ancient idea of the Mosaic story of creation. God made the animals and plants, species by species, put them in their places, and said to man, “Name them as you think fit, classify them, putting the like together and separating the unlike.” So God spake to Adam when he stood before him, naked as a Fuegian. Linné comes on the scene some six thousand years afterwards to set about this naming and arranging in earnest. But that does not make much difference. There are the species created by God. They have ceaselessly reproduced themselves since the days of Paradise according to the command to increase and multiply, each one in its own kind, so that the polar bear has only begotten polar bears, the giraffe giraffes, the hippopotamus hippopotami. Thus, in spite of death, the primitive Paradise is still there, and Linné, the official professor at Upsala, with his venerable wig and embroidered coat, can take up the work of the naked Adam with a good conscience, and finish what the patriarch had not been able to do. Linné died in 1778 (about the time when Goethe was beginning the _Iphigenia_ and _Wilhelm Meister_) in the full fame of all these achievements and all his hypotheses from the giraffe to God. Fifty years elapsed between this and Darwin’s voyage; but in those fifty years the following process is accomplished:—