 Kripke does not distinguish ‘essential property’ from ‘necessary property’. Fine (1994) notes that the claim that P is a necessary property of X is not the same as the claim that P is an essential property of X: the latter implies the former but the former does not imply the latter. The arguments for essentialism discussed above do not note this distinction and move quickly from claims about necessity to claims about essence: having shown that necessarily anything that is gold is made up of an element with atomic number 79, Kripke concludes that having atomic number 79 is an essential property of the kind gold. Fine’s point may not be an insuperable obstacle to establishing essentialism via the arguments of Kripke and Putnam. For it may be held, as Fine holds, that essences concern the nature or identity of things. One may then argue that the arguments of Kripke, Putnam, and others do appeal to intuitions concerning the nature and/or identity of natural kinds, and so the inferences to essentialism from claims about necessity are legitimate in these cases.