REFORM OF LINN.EUS. 389 







and Musa Clijfortiana added to this impression. The weight which 

 he had thus acquired, he proceeded to use for ^the improvement of 

 botany. His Fundaments Botanica and B'Miotheca Botanica appeared 

 in 1736 ; his Critica Botanica and Genera Plantarum in 1737 ; his 

 Classes Plantarum in 1738 ; his Species Plantarum was not published 

 till 1753; and all these works appeared in many successive editions, 

 materially modified. 



This circulation of his works showed that his labors were producing 

 their effect. His reputation grew ; and he was soon enabled to exert 

 a personal, as well as a literary, influence, on students of natural history. 

 He became Botanist Royal, President of the Academy of Sciences at 

 Stockholm, and Professor in the University of Upsal ; and this office 

 he held for thirty-six years with unrivalled credit ; exercising, by means 

 of his lectures, his constant publications, and his conversation, an extra- 

 ordinary power over a multitude of zealous naturalists, belonging to 

 every part of the world. 



In order to understand more clearly the nature arid effect of the 

 reforms introduced by Linnaeus into botany, I shall consider them under 

 the four following heads; Terminology, Nomenclature, Artificial 

 System, and Natural System. 



Sect. 2. Linncean Reform of Botanical Terminology. 



IT must be recollected that I designate as Terminology, the system of 

 terms employed in the description of objects of natural history ; while 

 by Nomenclature, I mean the collection of the names of species. The 

 reform of the descriptive part of botany was one of the tasks first 

 attempted by Linnaeus ; and his terminology was the instrument by 

 which his other improvements were effected. 



Though most readers, probably, entertain, at first, a persuasion that 

 a writer ought to content himself with the use of common words in 

 their common sense, and feel a repugnance to technical terms and 

 arbitrary rules of phraseology, as pedantic and troublesome ; it is soon 

 found, by the student of any branch of science that, without technical 

 terms and fixed rules, there can be no certain or progressive knowledge. 

 The loose and infantine grasp of common language cannot hold objects 

 steadily enough for scientific examination, or lift them from one stage 

 of generalization to another. They must be secured by the rigid 

 mechanism of a scientific phraseology. This necessity had been felt in 

 all the sciences, from the earliest periods of their progress. But the 



