Chap, ii.] from Cesalpino to Linnaeus. 75 



it he declines the great quantity of unnecessary work with which 

 botanists occupied themselves, and declares the scientific study 

 of plants to be the only end and aim of botany. He first 

 treats of naming, and lays down with respect to generic and 

 specific names the principles which Linnaeus afterwards con- 

 sistently applied, whereas Bachmann himself did not follow his 

 own precepts, but injured his reputation as a botanist by a 

 tasteless nomenclature. Nevertheless he declared distinctly 

 that the best plan is to designate each plant by two words, one 

 of which should be the name of the genus, the other that of the 

 species, and he ingeniously pointed out the great convenience 

 of this binary nomenclature in dealing with medicinal plants, 

 and in the writing of prescriptions. He refused to regard 

 cultivated varieties as species, though Tournefort and others 

 continued to do so. 



In his system he rejected the division into trees, shrubs, and 

 herbs, showing by good examples that there is no real distinc- 

 tion of the kind in nature. From many of his remarks in his 

 critical dissertations we might infer that he possessed a very 

 fine feeling for natural relationship, but at the same time 

 expressions occur which seem to show that he did not at all 

 appreciate its importance in the system ; we notice this in 

 Tournefort also. Because flowers come before the fruit he 

 jumps with curious logic to the conclusion that the main divi- 

 sions in the system should be derived from the flower, and in 

 following this rule he makes use of exactly that mark in the 

 corolla which has the least value for classification, namely, 

 regularity or irregularity of form. It is strange, moreover, 

 that Bachmann, who spent a considerable fortune on the pro- 

 duction of copper-plate figures of plants without any special 

 object, though he founded his system on the form of the 

 flower, should yet have devoted only a superficial study to its 

 construction ; his account of it is very inferior to that of any 

 one before or since his time. His classification thus founded 

 cannot be said to be an advance in systematic botany ; never- 



