Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/110

 , and above all the pre-eminent firmness and certainty which distinguished his mode of dealing with systematic botany, could not fail to make the profoundest impression on those who judged of the powers of an investigator of nature by these qualities alone. One of his greatest gifts was without doubt the power which he possessed of framing precise and striking descriptions of species and genera in the animal and vegetable kingdoms by means of a few marks contained in the smallest possible number of words; in this point he was a model of unrivalled excellence to all succeeding botanists.

On the whole the superiority of Linnaeus lay in his natural gift for discriminating and classifying the objects which engaged his attention; he might almost be said to have been a classifying, co-ordinating, and subordinating machine. He dealt with everything about which he wrote in the way in which he dealt with objects of natural history. The systematic botanists whom he mentions in the 'Classes Plantarum' are classified then and there as fructists, corollists, and calycists. All who occupy themselves in any way with botany are divided into two great classes, the true botanists and mere botanophils, and it is very characteristic of his way of thinking that he places anatomists, gardeners, and physicians in the latter class. True botanists again are either mere collectors or systematists. To the collectors belong all who add to the number of known plants, also authors of monographs and floras, and the botanical explorers of foreign countries, whom we should now more courteously call systematists. By systematists Linnaeus understands those who occupy themselves with the classification and naming of plants, and he divides them into philosophers, systematists proper, and nomenclators; the philosophers are those who study the theory of the science on principles founded on reason and observation, and are subdivided into orators, institutors, erystics, and physiologists; the latter are those who discovered the mystery of sexuality in plants, and hence Malpighi, Hales, and such men are not