CHAP, ii.] Organs from Cesalpino to Linnaeus. 89 



doctrine of sexuality, we find this sophistical style of reasoning 

 still more copiously displayed in the essay entitled ' Sponsalia 

 Plantarum' in the ' Amoenitates ' (i. p. 77), and in a worse 

 form still in the essay, ' Plantae Hybridae ' (Amoen. iii. p. 29). 

 That Linnaeus had not the remotest conception of the way in 

 which the truth of a hypothetical fact is proved on the prin- 

 ciples of strict inductive investigation is shown by these and 

 many other examples, and by his enquiry into the seeds of 

 mosses (Amoen. ii. p. 266), upon which he prided himself not 

 a little, but which is really inconceivably bad even for that time 

 (1750). It was not Linnaeus' habit to occupy himself with 

 what we should call an enquiry ; whatever escaped the first 

 critical glance he left quietly alone ; it did not occur to him to 

 examine into the causes of the phenomena that interested him ; 

 he classified them and had done with them ; as for instance 

 in his 'Somnus Plantarum,' as he called the periodical move- 

 ments of plants. We cannot read much of the ' Philosophia 

 Botanica ' or the ' Amoenitates ' without feeling that we are 

 transported into the literature of the middle ages by the kind 

 of scholastic sophistry which is all that his argumentation 

 amounts to ; and yet these works of Linnaeus date from the 

 middle of the last century, from a time when Malpighi, Grew, 

 Camerarius, and Hales had already carried out their model 

 investigations, and his contemporaries Duhamel, Koelreuter, 

 and others were experimenting in true scientific manner. This 

 peculiarity in Linnaeus explains why men like Buffon, Albert 

 Haller, and Koelreuter treated him with a certain contempt ; 

 and also why his strict adherents in Germany, who lived on his 

 writings and were unable to separate what was really good in 

 him from his mode of reasoning, came to make their own 

 botany like anything rather than a science of nature. Linnaeus 

 was in fact a dangerous guide for weak minds, for his curious 

 logic, among the worst to be met with in the scholastic 

 writers, was combined with the most brilliant powers of 

 description ; the enormous extent of his knowledge of par- 



