LINNEAN" SOCIETY OF LONDON. 51 



Botany. At the age of 28 he published the first edition of his 

 Systema Natures, " the golden book of the naturalist " (as it has 

 been called), wherein he depicts in concise and brilliant touches 

 the peculiarilies of the throe Kingdoms of Nature, and assigns to 

 different natural objects the relative positions which he thought 

 belonged to them. Before his death 10 editions of this book 

 were issued, its dimensions having increased continually (the 

 first comprised 12 printed folio pages, the last one edited by 

 Linnaeus himself 2300 pages octavo) — a circumstance that elo- 

 quently vouches for the value his contemporaries set upon a 

 work that in the strongest terms appeals to heart as well as 

 head. Especially should emphasis be laid ou the definite 

 boundary he drew between organic and inorganic nature; un- 

 hesitatingly, and supported by actual facts, he maintained tliat no 

 living thing ever came from dead matter, but only from the living 

 e^^ or seed. So fully was he convinced of the truth of it, that 

 when knighted he set in the middle of his coat of arms an egg in 

 remembrance of his favourite motto : " Omne vivum ex ovo." 

 In our days, through the investigations of Pasteur and others, this 

 century's dispute concerning a " generatio sequivoca " may at last 

 be considered as settled, and that with complete victory for the 

 Linnsean adage. 



Concerning, now, his special activity in the department of Zo- 

 oJocjij ; much of what has been said about Botany applies also 

 here. By establishing new, easily understood laws he made 

 scientific descriptive zoology possible, and he it was who laid 

 tlie first groundwork of a real system. Here, too, the work 

 of older naturalists was subjected to his critical scrutiny, and 

 innumerable are the mistakes that were corrected and the 

 incongruities that Avere rooted out. AVe might point to the 

 transferring of whales from fishes to the class Mammalia due to his 

 observations, also the employment of tlie difi^erences of dentition 

 in the classification of Mammalia, the rearrangement and descrip- 

 tion of reptiles, fishes, shells, &c. Even to a knowledge of the 

 conditions of animal life in general, and especially that of insects, 

 he has left contributions of considerable value. 



In the history of Mineralogy likewise he occupies a by no means 

 unimportant position, and that chiefly through his rearrangement 

 of the mineral kingdom. That this had to give place to another 

 system, founded on better grounds, is a natural consequence of 

 the rapid development of natural science during the last century ; 

 nevertheless his system forms one of the steps but for which 

 the mineralogists of our days would not have attained their pre- 

 sent position. No more stress need we lay upon the facts than 

 that the opinions of Linnaeus about the formation of crystals and 

 their value in the classification of minerals was held to be of such 

 importance that he was even called " the founder of crystallo- 

 graphy." 



Still more conspicuous was his energetic zeal in tlio fi.eld of 



