290 THROUGH THE FIELDS WITH LINNAEUS 



of which, they were only the records. Linnaeus thoroughly 

 devoted himself to Sweden, and to showing what could 

 be done and grown there, as his father in his smaller 

 way had done before him. This is why he is a great 

 man, and why I write his life and admire him. Like 

 Queen Elizabeth, he had his weaknesses; like Bacon also : 

 most people have their weaknesses (only some Germans 

 and a few great newspaper editors being supposed ex- 

 empt), and these in the great are made more patent by 

 contrast with their greatness. 



He made many mistakes, but the honour due to him 

 for having first enunciated the true principles for defining 

 genera and species, and his uniform use of ' trivial ' 

 names, will last as long as biology itself endures. He 

 found biology a chaos and left it a cosmos. 1 



' The science of natural history has now become so 

 vast that no man can ever take the lead again as a 

 universal naturalist.' 



The c Systema Naturae ' had already gone through 

 nine editions in different countries. The first volume of 

 the tenth edition by the author (Linnaeus) was published 

 in 1 758. The second volume, which came out the follow- 

 ing year, was an epitome of the vegetable kingdom. This 

 important work appeared, still more enlarged, in a 

 twelfth edition in 1766, in the lifetime of its author. To 

 this the mineral kingdom was added in a third volume 

 on the same plan with the first. We can readily pardon 

 the self-complacency of its author when, in the diary 



1 Jackson. 



