LINNiEUS 319 



short paper in the Transactions of the Swedish Academy 

 of Sciences for 1762, describing flashes emitted by the 

 flowers of Tropseolum, first observed in her father's 

 garden at Hammarby. At the death of his only son 

 the collections and books of Linnseus were offered by 

 his widow to Sir Joseph Banks, and ultimately purchased 

 by J. E. Smith. They are now the property of the 

 Linnean Society. 



The name of Linnseus is commemorated after the 

 custom of botanists by the beautiful little Linnsea 

 borealis, one of the commonest flowers of the Scandi- 

 navian woods. 



THE SYSTEM A NATURJE 



The twentieth century naturalist finds himself tolerably 

 at home in the Systema Natures of Linnseus. It is 

 true that many of the classes and orders, especially of 

 flowering plants, strike him as unnatural, and he sees that 

 Linnseus did not know enough about the lower inverte- 

 brates or the lower cryptogams to classify them properly, 

 but the genera and species wear a familiar look, and 

 both the method and the language are those of modern 

 natural history. The canons of the Philosophia Botanica 

 are here practically exemplified, and we see how great 

 is the resulting improvement. Eay was in some im- 

 portant respects more enlightened than Linnseus, as in 

 his separation of the Monocotyledons from the Dico- 

 tyledons, but how slow and ambiguous does his system 

 appear to any one who has worked by the Linnean 

 definitions ! It was Linnseus who first assigned every 

 known animal and plant to its class, order, genus and 

 species. Uniform binary nomenclature had been gradu- 

 ally making its way, though not without resistance, ever 

 since the time of the Bauhins. Rivinus in 1690 had 



