OF THE LIFE OF LINNAEUS. 
215 
botany remained an irregular and tottering edifice, the Materia Medico. 
mostly languished in the same condition. Thus a weak mother gave 
birth to a frail and puny daughter. 
LiNNiEus became the modern creator of botany and natural history, 
and at the same time of the Mcteria Medica. When he examined plants 
or other natural productions, their intrinsic properties and ceconomical 
or medical virtues were generally the objeCts of his attention. And the 
fruit of his observations (the finest which his knowledge of nature could 
produce) became a general description of the great apparatus of 
remedies which are embosomed for the benefit of man’s health in the 
three reigns of nature. 
As the richest of those reigns, he first described the vegetable pro- 
ductions, especially those which grow in his own country; and in a like 
manner, sometime after, those sanative substances which exist in the ani- 
mal and mineral reigns *. That spirit of precision and order which cha- 
racterises all his works, is also highly conspicuous in those descriptions. 
The confused appellations which had till then prevailed with regard to 
many plants were now destroyed ; he assigned to every plant its real rank, 
its pharmatical and botanical names, the synonomy or bye-names given 
by the ancients, its native soil and properties, and an exaCt description of 
its sanative virtues. Many medicaments which have since been cried 
up as new discoveries, had long ago been known to Linnaeus ; for in- 
I 
stance, a certain remedy against the Tcenia was puffed and spoken of in 
* Materia Medica e Regno Vegetabili. Holm. 1749. — E Regno Animali. Upsal, 1752. 
— E Regno Lapideo. Upsal , 1752. Respecting the first part of this work, John Gesnf.r 
wrote to Haller in the year 1749, “ LinnjEI Materiam Medicam accepi, jjiagno judicio 
«« non sine eximio usu digestura opusculura,” 
1 
France 
