440 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



and honour on behalf of the cause of exact research, by no means allowing 

 his own special sphere to be put in the shade; in speeches and writing he 

 championed the cause of biology, and his plea was heard far and wide. 

 Being a brilliant stylist and an eloquent speaker, he was elected a member 

 of the Swedish Academy, and in his old age he held the position of a recog- 

 nized patriarch in the sphere of natural science in his own country. Although 

 no friend of fantastic speculations, he shared his age's idealistic conception 

 of nature and thus found it easier to gain a hearing for his high aims; in one 

 of his writings he expressly calls biology a "supernatural" science, for life 

 is something higher, given from above, and its influences must not be ex- 

 plained according to the laws of inorganic nature. To his mind, biology 

 belongs not to the exact sciences, but to the historical; it is more closely 

 akin to theology than to physics and chemistry.^ In his special research work, 

 however. Fries is quite exact. His chief productions are his great works on 

 the Fungi, which have since formed the basis of classification in this class; 

 he has described quantities of species and given characters to genera and 

 families that still hold good. Next to these works should be mentioned his 

 treatises on the lichens; here he had a precursor in his fellow-countryman 

 Erik Acharius — born in 1757 and mentioned as Linnseus's last pupil, 

 afterwards provincial physician at Vadstena, died in 18 19 — but it was Fries 

 who established the lichen system, which was generally accepted until the 

 eighteen-sixties. Fries also performed a considerable service in producing 

 his classification of the phanerogams; among other things he maintained, 

 in opposition to de Candolle, that the Compositie are the highest-developed 

 of the phanerogams, and in this posterity has shown him to have been right. 

 His natural system has, with certain modifications, been generally utilized in 

 Scandinavia. 



At this point our description of the different spheres of biology has 

 brought us up to the period that is characterized by the launching of the 

 theory of the origin of species. It now remains for us to give a glance at 

 certain phenomena in the sphere of theoretical speculation that have given 

 direction to our modern biological views. 



^ Botanical Excursions {Botaniska utflykter^ I, pp. 11-13. Curiously enough, Haeckel from 

 his standpoint arrived at similar conclusions, of which more anon. 



