Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/100

 natural sciences which are distinguished by the term descriptive, and it is usual to say that a new epoch in the history of our science begins with him, as a new astronomy began with Copernicus, and new physics with Galileo. This conception of Linnaeus' historical position, as far at least as his chief subject, botany, is concerned, can only be entertained by one who is not acquainted with the works of Cesalpino, Jung, Ray, and Bachmann, or who disregards the numerous quotations from them in Linnaeus' theoretical writings. On the contrary, Linnaeus is pre-eminently the last link in the chain of development represented by the above-named writers; the field of view and the ideas of Linnaeus are substantially the same as theirs; he shares with them in the fundamental errors of the time, and indeed essentially contributed to transmit them to the 19th century. But to maintain that Linnaeus marks not the beginning of a new epoch, but the conclusion of an old one, does not at all imply that his labours had no influence upon the time that followed him. Linnaeus stands in the same relation to the systematists of the period we are considering that Kaspar Bauhin does to the botanists of the 16th century; as Bauhin gathered up all that was serviceable in his predecessors, Cesalpino only excepted, while the botanists of our second period drew again from him, though they set out from other points of view than his; so Linnaeus adopted all that the systematists of the 17th century had built upon the foundation of Cesalpino's ideas, gave it unity and fashioned it into a system without introducing into it anything that was fundamentally and essentially new; all that had been developed in systematic botany from Cesalpino to Tournefort culminated in him, and the results, which he put together in a very original form and with the power of a master, were no more unfruitful for the further development of botany than the contents of Kaspar Bauhin's works for the successors of Cesalpino.

Whoever carefully compares the works of Cesalpino, Jung, Morison, Ray, Bachmann, and Tournefort with Linnaeus,