44 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



shrubs to the latter, had been adopted by every botanical writer since 

 the days of Aristotle, and by its antiquity had gained an importance 

 to which it was by no means entitled. The first to note the great 

 demerit of such a primary division, from its uncertainty and repug- 

 nance to the spirit of system, was Augustus Rivinus, Professor of 

 Botany at Leipsic, who, eight years after the first publication of Ray's 

 system, that is in 1690, discarded it and proposed a classification 

 based wholly on the corolla. 



Knaut, Herman, Boerhave, Ruppius, and Ludwig were also 

 prominent botanists of this, the seventeenth, century, but the next 

 after Rivinus to advance a leading system was Joseph Pitton de 

 Tournefort, a native of Provence, and Curator of the Jardin du Roi. 

 Tournefort travelled through Spain, Holland and the East, collecting 

 extensively, and pub.lished his method of classification, " Elements 

 of Botany,'' in 1694. It was more definite but more artificial than 

 that of Ray, being based, like Rivinus', almost wholly upon modifi- 

 cations of the corolla, but unfortunately it revived the old division 

 of plants into trees and herbs, which the latter had so wisely 

 discarded. Its great advance over previous systems was, that in it, 

 genera, as we now understand them, were first established and 

 defined, all the species then known being referred to them, so that, 

 in one sense, Linnfeus was right in calling Tournefort the founder of 

 genera. 



Many authors of note followed the lead of Tournefort, includ- 

 ing Jussieu, Vaillant, Petit, Vallentin, Dillenius, Linden and Sloane, 

 but it was not until 1735 that Linnaeus, suddenly emerging from 

 obscurity, offered to the world a system of botany so far superior to 

 all others as to leave no room for dispute as to its comparative 

 merit. Karl Linne', or, as he is more commonly styled Linnceus, 

 was born on the 23rd of May, 1707, at Rashult, in Sweden. His 

 father, a clergyman, had designed his son for the same sacred call- 

 ing, but the boy's teachers seeing him pay less attention t© Hebrew 

 and theology than to the study of natural history, advised him to 

 apprentice him to shoemaking or some other trade, as being quite 

 unfit for any of the learned professions. Happily for the progress of 

 science this advice was not acted upon by the disappointed parent, 

 who, instead, accepted the offer of one Dr. Rothman, Professor of 

 Medicine in the College of Wexio, to give him an education pre- 

 paratory for his entering his own profession. For some time after 



