Carl Linnaeus

“ Linnæus soon satisfied himself that the latter was his Rubus Chamæmorus. The arcticus is a much more valuable plant for its fruit, which partakes of the flavour of the raspberry and strawberry, and makes a most delicious wine, used only by the nobility in Sweden.
[14] Its perpendicular height is two hundred Swedish ells. See Dissert. de Angermanniâ. ”

“ But he is the founder of botany and in a way of modern natural history to an extent but rarely vouchsafed in science to a single man. He left order where there had been confusion, and largely prescribed the development of a science for a century, until the time of Darwin and the theory of evolution. Linnaeus himself seems almost to have foreseen the course of events, for he said: 'A natural method is the first and last thing to be desired in botany; nature does not make leaps.' ”

“ Any attempt, during that period, to make use of it was rigorously suppressed, except among the pagan Arabians. Biological science stood still, scarcely even marking time. Says Packard “After Aristotle, no epoch-making zoologist arose until Linnaeus was born,” a yawning chasm of thirteen hundred years.
Linnaeus, born 1707, in Sweden, was the greatest naturalist of his time and might have done greater things for evolutionary ideas had it not been for the theological influences which restrained him. But, hindered as he was, he26 accomplished enough to entitle him to a place among the immortals. ”

“ For them, the study of nature consisted in observing and collecting widely, grouping or classifying animals and plants, learning about their habits, etc. Linnaeus made an epoch by introducing a method of naming plants and animals by giving to each two names—a generic and a specific name. This made knowledge more definite. He used Latin, which was the language of science, and, as his method was universally adopted, the same name came to apply to the same animal or plant in all countries. ”

“ Linnaeus is commonly regarded as the reformer of the natural sciences which are distinguished by the term descriptive, and it is usual to say that a new epoch in the history of our science begins with him, as a new astronomy began with Copernicus, and new physics with Galileo. This conception of Linnaeus' historical position, as far at least as his chief subject, botany, is concerned, can only be entertained by one who is not acquainted with the works of Cesalpino, Jung, Ray, and Bachmann, or who disregards the numerous quotations from them in Linnaeus' theoretical writings. ”

“ Apart from his special discoveries in the anatomy of plants and animals, and his descriptions of new species, the great merit of Linnaeus was his introduction of a method of enumeration and classification which may be said to have created systematic zoology and botany in their present form, and establishes his name for ever as the great organizer, the man who recognized a great practical want in the use of language and supplied it. ”

“ But the enormous stimulus which Linnaeus gave to the investigation of nature soon rendered it impossible that any one man should write another 'Systema Naturae,' and extremely difficult for any one to become even a naturalist such as Linnaeus was. ”

“ A retrospective glance at the progress of our science during the past century, in this connection, may perhaps help us to solve the difficulty. Linnaeus, in his System of Nature, does not admit Families; he has only four kinds of groups,—Classes, Orders, Genera, and Species. It was among plants that naturalists first perceived those general traits of resemblance which exist everywhere among the members of natural families, and added this kind of group to the framework of their system. In France, particularly, this method was pursued with success ”

“ The second merit has been less recognised, and yet it is at least of equal importance; it is that of having first perceived that the attempt made by Cesalpino and his successors to found a system, that shall do justice to natural affinities, on predetermined marks can never succeed. Linnaeus framed his artificial sexual system, but he exhibited a fragment of a natural system by its side, while he repeatedly declared that the chief task of botanists is to discover the natural system. Thus he cleared the ground for systematic botany. ”

“ No modern naturalist has impressed his own character with greater force upon his pupils than did Linnaeus. He imbued them with his own intense acquisitiveness, reared them in an atmosphere of enthusiasm, trained them to close and accurate observation, and then despatched them to various parts of the globe. ”

“ That new species can arise is, he continues, disproved by continuous generation and propagation, and by daily observation, and by the cotyledons. It is hard to understand how the Linnaean school till far into our own century could have remained firm in a doctrine resting on such arguments as these. Linnaeus' definition of varieties shows that he understood by the word species fundamentally distinct forms; there are, he says, as many varieties as there are different plants growing from the seed of the same species ”

“ At the present time it is considered only as a stepping-stone to the "natural" system; but at the time of its promulgation it was epoch-marking in its directness and simplicity, and therefore superiority, over any existing systems.
One of the great reforms effected by Linnaeus was in the matter of scientific terminology. Technical terms are absolutely necessary to scientific progress, and particularly so in botany, where obscurity, ambiguity, or prolixity in descriptions are fatally misleading. ”

“ He was appointed teacher of oriental languages at Upsala in 1777, and in 1785 demonstrator of botany. From 1792 he spent some years on the west coast of Africa, and in 1797-1798 acted as secretary of the Swedish embassy in London. Returning to Sweden, he founded the Linnaean institute at Upsala in 1802, and in 1812 became professor of materia medica at the university. He died at Upsala in 1837. In addition to various botanical writings, he published the autobiography of Linnaeus in 1823. ”

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“ This theological aspect of the subject is sufficiently curious when we consider it in relation to the history of biological knowledge, for Linnaeus at the beginning of the eighteenth century was the first naturalist who made a systematic attempt to define and classify the species of the whole organic world, and there are few species of which the limits and definition have not been altered since his time. In fact, at the present time there are very numerous groups, both in animals and plants, on the species of which scarcely any two experts are agreed. ”

“ We cannot read much of the 'Philosophia Botanica' or the 'Amoenitates' without feeling that we are transported into the literature of the middle ages by the kind of scholastic sophistry which is all that his argumentation amounts to; and yet these works of Linnaeus date from the middle of the last century, from a time when Malpighi, Grew, Camerarius, and Hales had already carried out their model investigations, and his contemporaries Duhamel, Koelreuter, and others were experimenting in true scientific manner. ”

“ He acquired a knowledge of medicine and surgery, became interested in the study of plants, and was finally cited by Linnaeus as the greatest natural botanist in the world. In 1728 he founded the first botanical garden in the United States, at Kingsessing, on the banks of the Schuylkill, not far from Philadelphia. ”

“ And in each of these there are and have been only a limited number of branches to the pedigree—some coming off at a lower level, others at higher points when more elaborate structure has been attained. It is easy to imagine groups of both plants and animals with characters and structures which have never existed and never will exist. The limitation of the whole process in spite of its enormous duration in time, its gigantic output and variety, is a striking and important fact. Linnaeus said, 'There are just as many species as in the beginning the Infinite Being created' ”

“ Bernard de Jussieu and his nephew, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, taking up Linnaeus' profounder and properly scientific efforts, made the working out of the natural system, in Linnaeus' own opinion the highest aim of botany, the task of their lives. Here more was needed than a perpetual repetition of descriptions of single plants after a fixed pattern; more exact inquiries into the organisation of plants, and especially of the parts of the fructification, must supply the foundation of larger natural groups. ”

“ It was strange that the greatest botanist of the day could not get a living out of his science, and it is not to the credit of his native country. Again Linnæus had to take to physic, and settling at Stockholm, found that the people would not trust him with the cure of their dogs, much less with that of themselves. ”

“ It is thus science may be advanced; and you will permit me to say, thus men of candour should treat one another."
Linnaeus is also criticised in the Vegetable System, more particularly for his unnecessary introduction of new names for plants; but here again Hill is full of praises for Linnaeus's descriptions of species. ”

“ The two companions pursued their favourite studies with an honourable spirit of emulation. They divided the kingdoms and provinces of nature between them, and while Linnæus yielded the palm to Artedi in ichthyology (the science of fish) , the latter acknowledged Linnæus to be his superior in entomology, or that of insects. Each kept his discoveries to himself, though for no great length of time, since not a day passed without one surprising the other by narrating some new fact, so that emulation produced mutual industry of research, and stimulated each to new exertions. ”

“ Linnaeus in his later years made some strange attempts to explain away this contradiction; his successors adopted a way of their own; various scholastic notions from the 16th century still survived among the systematists, especially after Linnaeus had assumed the lead among them, and it was thought that the dogma of the constancy of species might find especially in Plato's misinterpreted doctrine of ideas a philosophical justification, which was the more acceptable because it harmonised well with the tenets of the Church. ”

“ Linnaeus, the founder of a scientific system in botany, and the discoverer of sex in plants, was constantly hampered and constrained in his thoughts by the threats of the Reformation. A pretended miracle of turning water into blood appeared in his vicinity, and after looking into it carefully he reported that the reddening of the water was caused by dense masses of minute insects. ”

“ No naturalist of his century, and few naturalists of any period, have so universal a popular reputation, or are, by so nearly common consent, given a place among the immortals not far removed from Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz and Newton—to mention only his predecessors. Yet, when seriously scrutinized, Linnæus's position in the history of science is a peculiar one. With his name there is commonly associated no epoch-making hypothesis, not a single important discovery, not one fundamental law or generalization, in any branch of science. ”

“ Linnaeus’s primarily zoological classification of man did not, however, suit the philosophical opinion of the time, which responded more readily to the systems represented by Buffon, and later by Cuvier, in which the human mind and soul formed an impassable wall of partition between him and other mammalia, so that the definition of man’s position in the animal world was treated as not belonging to zoology, but to metaphysics and theology. ”

“ Linnaeus distinctly declared that this was his view, and his school in Germany and England adhered to it so firmly that it established itself with the general public, who to the present day consider it as a self-evident proposition that a botanist exists essentially for the purpose of at once designating any and every plant by a name. Like his predecessors, Linnaeus regarded morphology and general theoretical botany only as means to be used for discovering the principles of terminology and definition, with a view to the improvement of the art of describing plants. ”

“ What was more embarrassing, the number of distinct species went on increasing rapidly, indeed enormously, until, as an eminent zoological authority of our own time has declared, "for every one of the species enumerated by Linnaeus, more than fifty kinds are known to the naturalist of to-day, and the number of species still unknown doubtless far exceeds the list of those recorded." ”

“ We shall see further on to what surprising conclusions Linnaeus was himself led by his dogma, when he had to take into account the relations of affinity in genera and larger groups. The species and the genus, he continues, are always the work of nature, the variety is often that of cultivation; the class and the order depend both on nature and on art, which must mean that the larger groups of the vegetable kingdom have not the same objective reality as the species and the genus, but rest partly on opinion. ”

“ It was from Ray's Historia that Linnaeus learned the morphological principles and terminology of Jung which were the basis of his own work in descriptive Botany, and rendered possible the elaboration of his system of classification. But, in spite of Jung, the venerable division of plants into Trees and Herbs continued to hold its own for a time. As will be seen, it was still adhered to by Morison and by Ray, even after it had been shown to be quite untenable by Rivinus (Introductio Generalis in Rem Herbariam) in 1690, and did not finally disappear until the time of Linnaeus. ”