44 



A TEXTBOOK OF THEORETICAL BOTANY 



Linnaeus (Carl 



von Linne) 

 (Fig. 24), the great Swedish 

 botanist (1707-78), one of the 

 greatest systematizers in 

 science. That he was not un- 

 aware of his own pre-emin- 

 ence is shown by his proud 

 motto, " Deus creavit, Lin- 

 naeus disposuit." * His im- 

 mediate influence on the 

 science of his own day was due 

 to his skilful " sexual system," 

 an artificial system, quite in 

 the seventeenth-century tradi- 

 tion, based upon the number 

 of stamens and carpels in the 

 flower. It was much more 

 successful than any of the pre- 

 vious attempts of the kind and 

 became widely popular. Lin- 

 naeus, himself, however, was 

 fully aware of the need for a 

 natural system, though he, like 

 Ray, was unable to produce 

 more than the skeleton of such 

 a system. He left a list of 



sixty-five families, many of them with their present-day names, which he 



declared to be, in his opinion, natural, 



but he was unable to find definite rules 



of evidence for deciding the matter 



and owned that, for the time being, 



such a system rested on nothing more 



than instinctive feeling. 



The more enduring service of Lin- 

 naeus was his adoption of binomial 



nomenclature as a positive rule and 



his thoroughgoing application of it in 



his " Species Plantarum," 1753, in 



which he revised nomenclature accord- 

 ing to the new method. This marks an 



epoch in systematic botany, and it is 



taken as the oflicial starting-point from 



which all priority in nomenclature 



is reckoned. Earlier names, unless 



adopted by Linnaeus, were all dropped. 



[Cour/esy of the Linnean Society. 



• " God created, Linnaeus arranged." Fig. 27.— Portrait of Robert Brown. 



Fig. 26. 



I Courtesy of the Linnean Society. 

 -Portrait of Sir Joseph Hooker. 



I 



