334 LINN^US AND THE JUSSIEUS 



is the chief aim of botany. Headers of our own age 

 startled by the emphatic language in which Linnseu^ 

 seems to teach that the chief business of the botanist is 

 to name and place plants. He would have us to believe 

 that the more species a botanist knows the worthier 

 (prsestantior) he is ; that they are true botanists who 

 can name all plants ; that training in botany aims 

 at turning out in a single year men who can tell all 

 plants at a glance, without teacher, plates or descrip- 

 tion.^ Such language is evidently exaggerated; without 

 explanation it is not even intelligible. Method is no 

 doubt of fundamental importance to natural history, but 

 it is absurd to claim that a student of Upsala, who had 

 learned to tell a hundred native species by the help of 

 the Linnean key, was a greater botanist than Malpighi, 

 who possessed only the first rude outlines of a botanical 

 system ; or that a collector with his cabinet of two or 

 three hundred Lepidoptera, all of which he could name 

 without book, was a greater zoologist than K^aumur, 

 who could hardly define any species of insects with 

 precision. 



For about a century (say from 1750 to 1840 or 1850) 

 those naturalists who treated the authority of Linnaeus 

 with servile respect made it their chief, almost their 

 sole business, to catalogue, arrange, name and define. 

 This was strictly true only of the botanists, for in 

 zoology the Linnean method, far less peculiar and 

 exclusive, was less obstinately clung to. Nowhere w^as 

 the deterioration more evident than in England, where 

 botanists thought of little beyond the naming of plants. 

 Even the teachers of botany rarely used the microscope, 

 and knew^ little or nothing of minute structure. The 

 experimental study of plant-physiology was pursued 



^ Philosophia Botanicay §§7, 151, 256; introduction to Genera Plantarum. 



