22 The Science of Life. 



While the herbalists were working away with quiet 

 enthusiasm in . the north, and before their labours 

 Cesai ino reac ^ e< ^ their culmination in the industry of 

 Bauhin, a greater than any of them had 

 arisen in the south. This was Andrea Cesalpino (1519- 

 1603), a "thinker in presence of the plant world". 

 Although he was Aristotelian in bone and marrow a 

 teleologist, that is to say, and a believer in "the veget- 

 able soul " he displayed an intensity of observation 

 which was new, and he originated a mode of classifica- 

 tion which, though eventually proved to be erroneous, 

 was none the less fruitful. Although he denied the 

 sexuality of plants, and had no idea of the real functions 

 of leaves, he laid the foundations of comparative mor- 

 phology, and elaborated a classification an artificial 

 classification based on characters of seed, fruit, and 

 flower. He seized upon certain characteristics all too 

 partially conceived and forced plants into his a priori 

 scheme, with the result that not more than three of his 

 fifteen classes bear any approximation to natural groups. 

 Had the lesson of his failure been rightly read, more 

 than two centuries of taxonomic labour might have been 

 saved. 



To the careless and non-evolutionist readers of the 

 history of botany Linnaeus (1707-1778) was a sudden 

 emergence, a discontinuous variation, a revo- 

 lutionist who introduced order. But the 

 facts point to a different interpretation ; he was a syn- 

 thetic genius who gathered up what was best in the 

 work of the systematists from Cesalpino to Tournefort, 

 and made a better of it. This is no depreciation ; it is 

 true even in regard to Darwinism; Linnaeus was one of 

 the " great men " in the history of science, but no small 

 part of the secret of his greatness lay in the fact that 

 he appreciated the work of his predecessors. The 

 period from Cesalpino to Linnaeus included a succession 

 of illustrious workers, of whom the most important 

 were Joachim Jung (1587-1657), Robert Morison (1620- 

 1683), John Ray (1628-1705), Bachmann (1657-1725), 

 and Tournefort (1656-1708). 



Linnaeus was pre-eminently a describer and system- 



