In common with most naturalists of his day, the spirit of Linnæus was essentially a devout one. Admiration for the wonderful works of God was breathed on almost every page. "O Jehovah! quam ampla sunt opera Tua" is on the title-page of the "Systema Naturæ," and the inscription over the door of his home at Hammarby was to Linnæus the wisdom of his life. This inscription read: "Innocue vivito: Numen adest" (Live blameless: God is here).
The followers of Linnæus are divided into two classes, explorers and compilers. To the first class belonged his own students and others who ransacked all lands for species to be added to the lists of the "Systema Naturæ." Those men, mostly Scandinavian and Dutch, worked with wonderful zeal, enduring every hardship and making great contributions to knowledge, which they published in more or less satisfactory forms. To these men we owe the beginnings of the science of geographical distribution. Among the most notable of these are Pehr Osbeck and Fredrik Hasselquist, already noted; Otto Fabricius (1744-1822), author of an excellent "Fauna of Greenland"; Carl Peter Thunberg (1743-), successor of Linnæus as rector of the University of Upsala, who collected fishes about Nagasaki, intrusting most of the descriptive work to the less skillful hands of his students, Jonas Nicolas Ahl and Martin Houttuyn; Martin Th. Brünnich, who collected at Marseilles the materials for his "Pisces Massiliensis"; Petrus Forskål (1736-63), whose work on the fishes of the Red Sea ("Descriptio Animalium," etc.), published posthumously in 1775, is one of the most accurate of faunal lists, and one which shows a fine feeling for taxonomic distinctions scarcely traceable in any previous author. Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709-45), naturalist of Bering's expedition, gathered amid incredible hardships the first knowledge of the fishes of Alaska and Siberia, his notes being printed after his tragic death, by Pallas and Krascheninnikov. Petrus Simon Pallas (1741-1811) gives the account of his travels in the North Pacific in his most valuable volumes, "Zoographia Russo-Asiatica"; Johann Georg Gmelin (1709-55) with Samuel Theophilus Gmelin (1745-84), and Johann Anton Güldenstädt (1745-91), like Steller, crossed Siberia, recording its animals. Johann David Schöpf (1752-1800), a Hessian surgeon stationed at Long Island in the Revolutionary War, gave an excellent account of the fishes about New York.
Still other naturalists accompanied navigators around the globe, collecting specimens and information as opportunity offered. John Reinhold Forster (1729-98), with his son, John George Adam Forster (1754-94), and Daniel Solander (1736-81), a student of Linnæus, and Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), sailed with Captain James Cook. Philibert Commerson (1727-73) accompanied the explorer, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, and furnished nearly all the original material used by Lacépède. Other noted travelers of the early days were Pierre Sonnerat and Mungo Park.
Still other naturalists, scarcely less useful, gave detailed accounts of the fauna of their own native regions. Ablest of these was Anatole Risso, an apothecary of Nice, who published in 1810 the "Ichthyologie de Nice," an excellent work, afterward (1826) expanded by him into a "Histoire Naturelle de l'Europe Méridionalé."
Contemporary with Risso was a man of very different character, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1784-1842), who wrote at Palermo in 1810 his "Caratteri di Alcuni Nuovi Generi" and his "Ittiologia Siciliana." Later he went to America, where he was for a time professor in the Transylvania University at Lexington, Ky. Brilliant, erudite, irresponsible, fantastic, he wrote of the fishes of Sicily and later ("Ichthyologia Ohiensis," 1820) of the fishes of the Ohio River, with wide knowledge, keen taxonomic insight, and a hopeless disregard of the elementary principles of accuracy. Always eager for novelties, restless and credulous, his writings have been among the most difficult to interpret of any in ichthyology.
Earlier than Risso and Rafinesque, Thomas Pennant (1726-58) wrote of the British fishes; Otto Fredrik Müller of the fishes of Denmark; J. E. Gunner, Bishop of Thröndhjem, of fishes of Norway; Francis Valentijn (1660-1730), Jan Nieuhof (1600-1671), Renard, and Castour of the fishes of the Dutch East Indies; Duhamel du Monceau of the fisheries of France; Francesco Cette of the fishes of Sicily; José Cornide of the fishes of Spain; Ignacio Molina of the fishes of Chile; and Meidinger of those of Austria. Some of these writers lived before Linnæus. Others knew little of the Linnæan system, and their records are generally in the vernacular. Most important of this class is the work of Antonio Parra, "Descripcion de Diferentes Piezas de Historia Natural de la Isla de Cuba," published in Havana in 1787. In 1803, Patrick Russell gave a valuable account, non-binomial, of "Two Hundred Fishes Collected at Vizagapatam and on the Coast of Coromandel."
Papers on the fishes of Bering Sea and Japan by Wilhelm Theophilus Tilesius (1775-1835), are published in the transactions of the early societies of Russia. The collections of the traveler Krusenstern were recorded by Tilesius. Stephen Krascheninnikov (1786) wrote a history of Russia in Asia.
Other notable names among the early writers are those of Pierre Marie Auguste Broussonet, of Montpelier, whose work (1780), too soon cut short, showed marked promise; Fr. Faber, who wrote of the fishes of Iceland; E. Blyth, who studied the fishes of the Andamans; A. G. Desmarest, who made excellent studies of the fishes of Cuba; J. T. Kölreuter and Everard Home in the East Indies; Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, who recorded the fishes of Egypt at the command of Napoleon. Others equally notable were B. A. Euphrasen, Iwan Lepechin (1750-1802), John Latham, W. E. Leach, George Montagu, C. Quensel, Jean-Antoine Scopoli, Peter Ascanius, Francois Etienne de la Roche (1789-1812), Hans Ström, M. Vahl and Zuieuw.
The compilers who followed Linnæus belonged to a wholly different class. These were men of extensive learning, methodical ways, sometimes brilliant, occasionally of deep insight, but more often, on the whole, dull, plodding, and mechanical.
Earliest of those is Antoine Gouan, whose "Historia Piscium" was published in Paris in 1770. In this work, which is of fair quality, only genera were included, and the three new ones which he introduces into the "System" (Lepadogaster, Lepidopus, and Trachypterus) are still retained with his definition of them.