332 LINNiEUS AND THE JUSSIEUS 



necessary for the profitable discussion of deep questions 

 of biology. He was, for example, utterly unable to deal 

 with the great unformulated question of the nature oi 

 affinity. He did indeed undertake to explain how 

 affinities arose, but no practical naturalist could have 

 explained it worse. He propounds the general principle 

 that all the species which now exist were created in the 

 beginning.^ But doubts of various kinds and different 

 degrees of weight had occurred to himself and others 

 we shall mention only one. The water-gentian (Vil- 

 larsia or Limnanthemum) has the fruit of a gentian, bul 

 the leaf of a water-lily. This could, Linnseus supposes^ 

 mean nothing less than that the w^ater-gentian is 

 hybrid between a gentian and a water-lily, and witl 

 incredible rashness he affirmed that the pollen of 

 water-lily had fertilised the pistil of a gentian. Ndl 

 proofs were adduced, and without pausing to sub- 

 stantiate his crude speculation, Linnaeus went on to 

 extend it without limits. The Creator, he tells us, had 

 originally fashioned a few independent forms, which he 

 allowed to commingle ; thence came genera. Nature 

 then took the genera in hand, and commingled them, 

 thereby producing species. Lastly, chance operatec 

 on the species, and produced varieties. The wonder 

 that a naturalist who, stans pede in uno, put forth s( 

 daring and unsupported a theory, should ever have beei 

 listened to again on the affinity question. It is a trifl< 

 that he contradicts his own general principle (quoted in 

 the last foot-note).^ 



1 " Species tot enumeramus, quot diversse formse in principio sunt creatae.' 

 Phil. BoL, §157. 



2 See Linnseus, Phil. Bot., § 157 and passages there cited, Genera Plantarum, 

 6th ed., 1764, p. v. (not in earlier editions), Fundamentum Fructificationis 

 and Plan tee Hybridse in Amoen. Acad. ; also Sachs' comments in Histori/ of 

 Botany, Eng. trans., pp. 105-7. 



