LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LOIfDON. 49 



gether with an account of their native country, manner of appear- 

 ing, properties, uses, and so fortb, — and all this in a way easily 

 apprehended in accordance with the simple laws he himself had 

 established, which have never been surpassed. All his work he 

 endeavoured to arrange on the most natural and easily compre- 

 hended plan, whence also many of his most radical changes in 

 descriptive botany (and even in zoology) — for instance, denoting 

 the natural object with but one name for the genus and one for 

 the species, in place of the prior customary, tedious descriptions 

 — remind one somewhat of the egg of Columbus. In short, in 

 small as well as large things, he proved himself a master yet un- 

 surpassed in producing regularity and order where previously 

 ignorance, carelessness, or arbitrariness had generated obscurity 

 and confusion. 



The greatness and Bcientific importance of Linnteus as the real 

 lawgiver in the realm of descriptive botany is now no longer 

 denied, yet to that not seldom his merits are limited. Special 

 stress has sometimes been laid on what seemed to some an un- 

 pardonable defect, that he was not qualified for the study of vege- 

 table anatomy, and that, by this very fact, he revealed a one-sided 

 love for descriptive botany. This reproach is chiefly jiut forth 

 by such anatomists as are themselves so one-sided that they look 

 down on other parts of botany with contempt, and particularly on 

 the descriptive branch. They overlook thereby not only the fact 

 that the pure anatomy of plants is itself principally descriptive, 

 but even that, far from making up the sv;m total of the science, it 

 is but a means to reach to a deeper insight in the life-activity 

 which reveals itself by the different parts of the plant, and into 

 the manner in which all the different links in the great chain of 

 innumerable forms are united with one another. Moreover, how 

 could Linnaeus have found the time for such work ? Does it not 

 border on the miraculous to have accomplislied what he did ? At 

 his death he had published 32 larger special works (some of them 

 in several complete revised editions), 187 academic dissertations, 

 63 treatises for learned societies, 17 programs, together with no 

 insignificant number of lesser articles, besides what he left in 

 manuscript, which has since been published in part. And here, too, 

 we ought not to forget his untiring activity as a teaclier, as Di- 

 rector of the Botanic Garden, and as correspondent with students 

 and patrons of natural science in the whole world, not to mention 

 many other things that taxed his time and strength. 



For the rest, one can with good reason assert against those 

 who charge Linnaeus with being too partial to descriptive botany, 

 that they either disclose gross ignorance or else speak untruth 

 when they really know better. In unmistakable w^ords Linnieus 

 himself declares that the naming, describing, and classifying of 

 plants is not the onlj^ and highest function of the science, but 

 only a necessary condition for a successful study of the more im- 

 portant parts. To learn a language, says he, in that remarkable 



LINN. SOC. PROCEEDINGS. — SESSION 1887-88. 6 



