break away from the scholastic philosophy which hampered 

 him. We find a curious mixture of a modern spirit of 

 inductive natural science and Aristotelian methods of 

 thought. The latter triumphed in the main, and the result 

 was a formal classification built on idealistic abstractions 

 that is wholly fallacious from our standpoint of to-day. 



Emerging from such conditions we find Linnaeus the 

 bicentenary of whose birth was celebrated last year and 

 though he too was much influenced by the earlier writers, 

 to him belongs the credit of the emphasis on the fact that 

 some natural system of the classification of plants must 

 exist even though he could not determine it. Linnaeus is 

 popularly termed the father of botany and of zoology as 

 well, and in many senses there is reason for it. He was a 

 born classifier and brought considerable order out of im- 

 mense chaos, but still his classification was artificial, and 

 only to a very limited degree recognized the natural rela- 

 tionships of plant forms. Linnaeus, however, was wise 

 enough to recognize its artificiality. 



From Linnaeus the advance was more rapid, and, while 

 most of the study in plants centered on the work of classi- 

 fication, there were unmistakable signs of other interests. 

 The ideas of the classifier were still hampered by the 

 dogma of the constancy of species, which continually 

 clashed with the insistent and undeniable evidences of the 

 genetic relationships of organic forms. Despite the move- 

 ment in favor of the idea of the development of species 

 from previously existing forms, despite the views ad- 

 vanced by Lamarck and others at about that time, despite, 

 indeed, the more strictly botanical investigations in the 

 morphological field which were brought forward during the 

 first half of the nineteenth century: despite all these things, 

 the botanist was unable to break away from the concept of 

 groups of plants as abstract ideas. It was not until 1859 

 that the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species" drove 



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