LINN^US 335 



only by rare and isolated individuals, among whom 

 Stephen Hales (1677-1761) and Thomas Andrew Knight 

 (1758-1838) were conspicuous. The remarkable though 

 inconclusive experiments of Priestley on the nutrition 

 of green plants were relinquished without an effort to 

 foreign chemists. Eobert Brown (1773-1858), the one 

 great English botanist who devoted himself to the 

 tracing of natural affinities, to structure and develop- 

 ment, was in all things anti-Linnean. France never 

 accepted the Sexual System of Linnaeus. Adanson and 

 the Jussieus kept their attention fixed on the enter- 

 prise conceived and partly realised by L'Obel, Ray and 

 Linnaeus himself, viz. the recognition and delimitation 

 of truly natural families of flowering plants. De 

 Candolle, a Genevese, but French by training and 

 long residence in France, became the most luminous 

 exponent of their views. France did much more than 

 maintain a protest against the narrower Linnean spirit ; 

 she was during almost the whole period of obscuration 

 the leader of biological thought, and her influence 

 tended to enlargement and emancipation. Germany, 

 which had at first received the Sexual System coldly, 

 became more and more Linnean as time went on, and 

 exhibited in something like the same proportion the 

 feebleness of the English botanists. 



It would be unjust to lay the whole blame of this 

 temporary and partial arrest of development upon any 

 one man. No scientific worker is so many-sided or so 

 prophetic that he can be trusted to legislate for a great 

 department of natural knowledge. Aristotle, Linnaeus 

 and Cuvier were three of the most fruitful labourers 

 in the field of biological science ; if each of the three 

 was allowed to obstruct progress, we must seek the 

 cause in that unreasoning submission which mankind 



