vi PREFACE 



space impartially among the persons or things to be 

 described ; the product, however well-proportioned, is 

 sure to be lifeless. 



Some readers will be surprised that I give so wide an 

 extension to the word early as to include Buffon and 

 the Jussieus. But the time has already come when 

 hardly any eighteenth-century naturalists, with the 

 exception of a few eminent students of life-histories 

 (Swammerdam, Reaumur, &c. ), are searched for biological 

 facts ; they are important merely as historical land- 

 marks. Indeed zoology and botany have been so 

 largely recast since 1859 that we shall shortly make 

 Darwin's Origin of Species the era of modern biology, 

 and consider all naturalists early who precede Darwin. 



It would have been a delightful task, had it been 

 possible, to continue the history through the age of 

 evolutionary speculation ; to show how Linnaeus' rude 

 sketch of the kingdoms of nature has been enlarged ; 

 how new studies, of which Linnaeus had little conception 

 (comparative anatomy, embryology, geographical distri- 

 bution and palaeontology), have become strong and 

 fertile ; how a fairly satisfactory grouping of the genera 

 of flowering plants into families has been devised, how 

 the cryptogams, long despised as casual and unstable, 

 have been proved to rival the flowering plants in prac- 

 tical importance and intellectual interest ; and how the 

 history of extinct animals and plants has been illumi- 

 nated by a theory of continuous descent. I need make 

 no apology for having declined so vast and so difficult 

 an addition. 



Some biographers seem to hold that nothing in the 

 career of a man of science signifies very much except 

 his effective contributions to knowledge. His mistakes 

 and failures, however many and grievous, are, they 



