Ichthyology

Ichthyology. The study of fishes. The anchor is Peter Artedi’s Ichthyologia, 1738 — the first systematic classification of fishes by countable, checkable characters, chiefly fin-ray counts, which gave the subject a method rather than a catalogue. Artedi drowned in an Amsterdam canal in 1735 and the work was edited and published by Linnaeus, who had been his friend and who carried the classificatory principles into his own system. The rival anchor is the 1550s cluster of encyclopedic fish books, of which Rondelet’s of 1554–55 is the fullest. Those describe; Artedi’s classifies.