Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/103

 not from differences of function, but from the number and mode of union, which are of no importance for the sexual function. We meet with this error in Leibnitz and Burckhard, who are mentioned here merely to defend Linnaeus from the charge repeatedly brought against him by his contemporaries that he was indebted to these two writers for the idea of his sexual system. They erroneously found in the great physiological importance of the sexual organs a reason for deriving from their differences the principles of division that were to found a system; this error in theory Linnaeus shared with them, but they did not correct it in practice, as Linnaeus did, by confining himself to purely morphological features in working out his system. What the renowned philosopher incidentally uttered in the year 1701 on the matter in question is moreover so unimportant and so indistinct, that Linnaeus could not gain much from it; what Burckhard says on the subject in his often-quoted letter to Leibnitz (1702) is indeed much better, and comes near to Linnaeus' idea; but it is a very long way from the hints there given to the completion of the well-articulated and highly practical system which Linnaeus constructed. The botanists of the 16th century, and in the main even Morison and Ray, had in one-sided fashion devoted their chief attention to distinguishing species, Bachmann and Tournefort to the establishment of generic characters, while they neglected species; Linnaeus, on the contrary, applied equal care and much greater skill to describing both genera and species. He reduced to practical shape the suggestion which Bachmann had left to his successors, and so must be regarded, if not as the inventor, at least as the real founder of the binary nomenclature of organisms. It is only fulfilling the duty of a historian to state the sources