SCIENTIFIC IMPORTANCE 
369 
instances of “ lusus naturse/’ nature’s playwork, or 
products of unnatural origin, he studied them and 
concluded that they were really the remains of 
animals and plants, which sank to the bottom of the 
sea or lakes, and there were covered by mud, which 
afterwards hardened to stone. On these grounds he 
showed that Gotland is chiefly built of coral, to which 
he devoted special attention. That the petrification¬ 
bearing beds occurred above the present level of the 
sea, he attributed to an ever-proceeding diminution 
of water. 
Still more eminent was Linne’s activity in the 
domain of medicine. His attempt to arrange 
various diseases in systematic order, like everything 
else from his hand, bore the stamp of genius, and 
gives him a position higher than many of his pre¬ 
decessors ; his “ Materia medica ” being always 
reckoned as a classic in pharmacological literature. 
In many respects he was ahead of his contemporaries 
in medicine, as proved subsequently. Thus he 
wrote on the subject of certain skin affections caused 
by parasitic “ small animals ” or bacteria, on the 
proper nursing of young children, on public health, 
on tuberculosis infection, and conveyance of the 
infective particles in the clothes of patients, on the 
hurtfulness of unnecessary bleeding (then so univer¬ 
sally practised), the value of electricity in certain 
complaints, on polypus, on the treatment of ague by 
quinine, etc., etc. Bacteria in his writings, appear 
as the cause of many diseases, especially small-pox, 
measles and other eruptive fevers, also of fer¬ 
mentation and putrefaction. Probably he himself 
never saw these microscopically small organisms, 
but he had no doubt that the above-mentioned 
diseases were due to “ nothing else than living 
particles.” 
Great spirits impress their stamp on their times, 
and it is not difficult to discover many a Linnean 
influence in the eighteenth century, especially in its 
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