io6 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



out with him. The unlucky position into which he got himself as regards 

 both his family and his colleagues was also no doubt responsible for the 

 sale (ignominious indeed for his country) of the collections of Linnasus — 

 his herbarium, library, and correspondence — to England, where they are 

 still preserved by the Linnean Society, which was founded for that purpose. 



His fame 

 LiNN^us has in the course of years been very differently judged. Already 

 in his youth he had been hailed by his contemporaries as the " princeps botan- 

 icorum,'' a title that he succeeded in holding, not only throughout his life, 

 but long after his death. But the reverse came in connexion with the accept- 

 ance of the descent theory in the middle of last century, for the opponents 

 of this doctrine quoted Linnaeus as their chief authority, and that not only 

 on scientific grounds but also from motives which lay far removed from all 

 that natural science means: his primitive Christian piety was thrust into 

 the breach by religious and social conservatism against the "unbelief" of 

 the new biology. It was naturally inconceivable that in such circumstances 

 Linnasus and his works should be judged with impartiality; in the eyes of 

 many he became simply the arch-enemy of the new science, and the judg- 

 ments passed on him at the time were often not only spiteful, but also utterly 

 absurd. Towards the close of the century, however, a calmer atmosphere 

 prevailed, as was clearly manifested when in 1907 the bicentenary of Lin- 

 naeus 's birth was celebrated by the entire civilized world as a red-letter 

 day in the annals of human culture. 



Linnasus is universally reckoned among the examples of early scientific 

 maturity, and it is true that by the time he had reached about his twenty- 

 fifth year, he had already fully worked out the principles on which his sub- 

 sequent work rests. Less remarked has been the steady development which 

 he underwent so long as he was generally capable of working; the Linnasus 

 whom we meet in the first edition of the Systetna natura and writings contem- 

 porary therewith is not in the least the same person as the one who composed 

 the final editions of that work. This may to some extent explain why such 

 contradictory judgments have been passed on him; the one has sought sup- 

 port for its opinion of him in the work of his youth, the other in that of 

 his old age. 



His general conceptions of nature 

 If on the basis of Linnasus's writings we were to try to form an opinion as 

 to his general conception of nature, we should soon discover that he never 

 formulated any elaborate theory of the phenomena of life in their entirety, 

 such as Hoffmann, Stahl, and Boerhaave did, each in his own way. In the 

 works of his youth there appears only a naively popular conception of nature, 

 which, as a matter of fact, he retained, practically speaking, throughout 

 his life : nature is created by God to His honour and for the blessing of man- 



