52 HISTORY OF BOTANY 



These are, I think, the Systema Naturae, 1735 ; the Funda- 

 menta Botanica, 1736; the Genera Plantarum, 1737; the 

 Classes Plantarum, 1738; and the Philosophia Botanica, 



Linnaeus's outstanding characteristic is his power 

 of describing and systematising. Sachs calls him a 

 classifying, co-ordinating, and subordinating machine; 

 he even classified the very botanists whose works he 

 studied. He collected all the works of his predecessors, 

 picked out all he thought best in them, and, with scissors 

 and paste, welded the scraps into one concrete whole. 

 Not that he palmed off the compilation as his own original 

 production far from it. Each author received due 

 credit for what he had accomplished. He picked out a 

 beam here, a tile there, a block of stone somewhere else, 

 and out of the total mass of constructive material he 

 built a house. His pre-eminent skill as a literary architect 

 enabled him to erect a building that was hailed as a 

 masterpiece both by his contemporaries and by genera- 

 tions of admiring pupils ; a house perhaps convenient 

 to dwell in at the time it was erected but unadaptable 

 and quite unsuited to more modern requirements. It 

 was as though the Hall of Cedric the Saxon had been 

 offered to you as a residence in the twentieth century ; 

 where would you find accommodation for your modern 

 furniture, even if you were successful in obtaining per- 

 mission from sanitary, municipal, and other authorities 

 to live in it at all ? 



Linnaeus himself was conscious that the scheme of 

 classification he put forward was more or less of a make- 

 shift, for in the Philosophia Botanica, written in the later 

 years of his life, he attempted an entirely new system, 

 which, however, he did not live to finish. 



In trying to estimate Linnaeus's merits I cannot do 

 better, to begin with, than quote the opinion of Bentham, 

 his great successor in taxonomy : " It was reserved for 

 the master mind of the immortal Swede to fix, by the 



