CHAPTER III. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE NATURAL SYSTEM UNDER THE 

 INFLUENCE OF THE DOGMA OF THE CONSTANCY OF SPECIES. 



i759- l8 5- 



FROM the year 1750 Linnaeus' terminology of the organs of 

 plants and his binary method of naming species came into 

 general use ; the opposition which his doctrines had till then 

 encountered by degrees died away, and if all that he taught 

 was not universally accepted, his treatment of the art of 

 describing plants soon became the common property of all 

 botanists. 



But in course of time two very different tendencies were 

 developed ; most of the German, English, and Swedish 

 botanists adhered strictly to Linnaeus' dictum, that the merit 

 of a botanist was to be judged by the number of species with 

 which he was acquainted ; they accepted Linnaeus' sexual 

 system as one that completed the science in every respect; 

 they thought that botany had reached its culminating point in 

 Linnaeus, and that any improvement or addition could only 

 be made in details, by continuing to smooth over some uneven- 

 nesses in the system, to collect new species and describe them. 

 The inevitable result was that botany ceased to be a science ; 

 even the describing of plants which Linnaeus had raised to an 

 art became once more loose and negligent in the hands of such 

 successors ; in place of the morphological examination of the 

 parts of plants there was an endless accumulating of technical 

 terms devoid of depth of scientific meaning, till at length a 



