section_path: Phylogeny and evolution/Taxonomy/Early
section_name: Early
paragraph_text: Early
  
  Aristotle was the first to describe the insects as a distinct group. He placed them as the second-lowest level of animals on his scala naturae, above the spontaneously generating sponges and worms, but below the hard-shelled marine snails. His classification remained in use for many centuries.
  
  In 1758, in his Systema Naturae, Carl Linnaeus divided the animal kingdom into six classes including Insecta. He created seven orders of insect according to the structure of their wings. These were the wingless Aptera, the 2-winged Diptera, and five 4-winged orders: the Coleoptera with fully-hardened forewings; the Hemiptera with partly-hardened forewings; the Lepidoptera with scaly wings; the Neuroptera with membranous wings but no sting; and the Hymenoptera, with membranous wings and a sting.
  
  Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, in his 1809 Philosophie Zoologique, treated the insects as one of nine invertebrate phyla. In his 1817 Le Règne Animal, Georges Cuvier grouped all animals into four embranchements ("branches" with different body plans), one of which was the articulated animals, containing arthropods and annelids. This arrangement was followed by the embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer in 1828, the zoologist Louis Agassiz in 1857, and the comparative anatomist Richard Owen in 1860. In 1874, Ernst Haeckel divided the animal kingdom into two subkingdoms, one of which was Metazoa for the multicellular animals. It had five phyla, including the articulates.