Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/131

Rh facts that his very lucid tabular analyses of the common structural features of animals are arranged dichotomously, that in each division and subdivision a single adjective or adjectival phrase indicates the most important common feature of the animals in question, and that these terms are, as we have seen, in many cases borrowed from Aristotle.

Ray, like Linnæus, gave more attention to plants than to animals, and depended upon his colleague, Willughby, for much of the data, especially in the fishes. And, like Linnæeus also, Ray had a superb gift of order and a philosophical mind that made him a worthy countryman and contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton.

In his tabular analysis Ray distinctly foreshadows Linnæus in the following points:

1. The higher vertebrates are contrasted with the fishes as breathing by lungs instead of gills.

2. The whales are classed with the viviparous animals and expressly removed from the fishes, from which they were further distinguished by the horizontality of the tail fin. This step, however, was felt to be so radical that Ray afterwards constructed a definition which included both whales and fishes.

3. As remarked by Gill, the terrestrial or quadruped mammals are bracketed with the aquatic as "Vivipara," and contrasted with the "Ovipara" or "Aves." "The Vivipara are exactly coextensive with Mammalia, but the word vivipara was used as an adjective and not as a noun. Linnæus did not catch up with this concept till 1758, when he advanced beyond it by recognizing the group as a class and giving it an apt name."

4. The double ventricle is noted as characteristic of both Tivipara and Ovipara.

5. In order to associate the "Manati" and other amphibious mammals with their terrestrial congeners the term "hairy animals" is employed as more comprehensive than quadrupeds.

Ray further set the standard for Linnæus in his concise descriptions of European and foreign mammals, especially those described by travelers in America and in the east. Ray often used the term "species" merely as the equivalent of the middle English "spece," which survives in our word "spice," and meant "kind"; it was also equivalent to the logical "species (cf. the Greek εὶδς) of the schoolmen and is exemplified in Ray and Willughby's "Historia Piscium" in such phrases as "clarias niloticus Belonii mustelæ fluviatilis." "bagre piscis barbati acaculeati species." But Ray also used the term species in quite a Linnæan manner, as in the names Ovis laticauda, Ovis strepsiceros, Ovis domestica, etc. In form, at least, this foreshadows the binomial