BICENTENARY OF LINNAEUS 79 



science, and ever striven to support and stimulate it — desires to express to 

 you its profound appreciation of the debt we all owe to the great Swedish 

 naturalist whose birth in 1707 you commemorate. 



If science is classified knowledge, the highest credit belongs to him Avho 

 brings scientific facts and observations into a rational system: in this work 

 Linnaeus stands pre-eminent. To his keen mind it w^as given not only to 

 bring order among the genera and species of plants and animals, not only 

 to build up a lasting system of nomenclature, but also to develop in these 

 directions, as in the broader relations, a profound basis of classification 

 which has had a lasting influence upon science in all its branches. 



Edward S. Dana, Editor-in-chief. 



The Torrey Botanical Club, New York City. 



A clearly-stated conspectus of contents and an index so arranged that one 

 may consult the contents with a minimum of labor are two crowning features 

 of any volume. They reveal a systematic as well as a constructive intelli- 

 gence on the part of the author, and mark the boundaries between chaos 

 and clearness. It is with this feeling that botanists look back to Linnseus, 

 not so much for the originality of his research as for his gift of order, by 

 means of which the unclassified botanical observations of two centuries were 

 reduced to a system. It matters not that this system perished almost in a 

 generation; it served a purpose in its own day, and made progress possible 

 to those who had previously been wandering over a boundless sea with 

 neither stars nor sun to guide them. Linnaeus is remembered, not because 

 of his research, but because of his arrangement of existing knowledge in a 

 usable form. 



In spite of his blunders (for he was not free from them), in spite of his 

 arbitrary substitutions of his own work for the clearer work of others, in spite 

 of the fact that he emphasized system at the expense of the broader principles 

 of comparison, and withal contributed to the fixing, for five generations, 

 the dogma of constancy of specific characters, — botanists will always regard 

 Linnaeus as one of the truly great. He was the "father of botany," not 

 even its elder brother. He was not the author of binomial nomenclature, 

 for that originated before Linnaeus was born; he was the first who was able 

 to look at the existing knowledge of plant life with some degree of perspective, 

 and he reduced that knowledge to a system, that botany might later become 

 a science. 



LuciEN M. Underwood, Committee. 



