PROCEEDINGS 



OF THE 



WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



Vol. XI, pp. 17-26 March 31, 1909 



LINNiEUS AS AN EVOLUTIONIST.^ 

 By Edward L. Greene. 



Not more than two decades have passed since with most people 

 who had interested themselves in such matters, and with quite all who 

 had not, evolutionistic theory and Darwinism were synonymous; the 

 supposition being that Charles Darwin had been the original inventor, 

 as well as the strong promulgator, of the hypothesis of the descent of 

 present-time species of living things from earlier types. That mis- 

 understanding nowhere now prevails; and while a multitude of talkers 

 and writers on all sorts of topics use freely the term evolution, Darwin- 

 ism is less frequently mentioned; for it is coming to be realized some- 

 what generally that there were "Darwinians" not a few, not only be- 

 fore the Darwin of the nineteenth century, but even before that almost 

 as remarkable grandsire Darwin of the eighteenth. There were evo- 

 lutionists among the Greeks of five and twenty centuries ago, and 

 even among the earliest luminaries of Christian philosophy and the- 

 ology of a period only less remote; while after the revival of learning, 

 and of an interest in nature study, evolutionistic ideas found expres- 

 sion not infrequently: and of late, historians of science are bringing 

 all this to light. 



The catalogue of more or less distinctly evolutionistic naturalists 

 who lived before the end of the eighteenth century, and who gave some 

 expression to their ideas on this topic, is not a short one; but the name 

 of Linnaeus has not, in so far as I can learn, been placed on that list 

 hitherto, except very hypothetically.^ 



' Read before the Biological Society of Washington, November ii, 1905. 



^ In the environment of the idea of evolution Linnaeus may be considered 

 not as a positive but as one of the negative factors. — Osborne, From the 

 Greeks to Darwin, p. 128. 



