Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/341

Rh what Buffon had begun. The indirect evidence may be taken from our own Oliver Goldsmith, of all English authors perhaps at once the most vain and the most delightful. He himself wrote a Natural History, though he can scarcely disguise his contempt for naturalists. He confesses that at first he had thought of translating the credulous Pliny, and of adding his own precious comments to make the work amusing, treating, as he says, what he then conceived to be an idle subject in an idle manner. But Buffon's 'History of Quadrupeds' appeared, and Goldsmith bowed to the authority of a master mind.

The same year that gave Buffon to France gave to Sweden Linnæus. His name, like Shakespeare's, is one of the few so perfectly familiar everywhere, so universally renowned and cherished, that the owner of it seems to belong to every land as much as to his actual birthplace. He taught the world that Nature has a system. He took all naturalists for his pupils, and taught them how to speak. He taught them, I mean, how to name the objects of their study. He did in this respect for science what the inventors of money did for trade and commerce. He bade us designate each species by a couple of words instead of by a descriptive paragraph. By thus making simple and easy what before was complicated and cumbrous, he for the first time made possible a thorough discussion of all plants and animals, and threw open the study to mankind at large. Moreover, he took for his pupils men of special devotion, Kalm and Hasselquist and Forskal and many others, and sent them travelling over the world to observe its treasures. He made an orderly record of all the natural history objects discovered by all men everywhere. He gave, in short, by his example and by his teaching, by what he himself did and by what he induced others to do, such an impetus to our science as no one man had ever given it before.

The name of James Hutton is far less dazzling, by far less widely celebrated, than that of Linnæus; but it has been shown by those competent to judge that Hutton's services to science were of the order which can truly be described as epoch-making. His 'Theory of the Earth' upset many ancient opinions as deeply rooted as mountain chains, as widely spread as the main oceans. Contrary to the apparent evidence of men's senses, he maintained that the crust of the globe is a great piece of machinery perpetually