Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/126

 another in habit and fructification, that is, absolutely distinct. In the communication of 1764 the following words occur:—

1. Creator T.O. in primordio vestiit vegetabile medullare principiis constitutivis diversi corticalis, unde tot difformia individua, quot ordines naturales, prognata.

2. Classicas has plantas Omnipotens miscuit inter se, unde tot genera ordinum, quot inde plantae.

3. Genericas has miscuit natura, unde tot species congeneres, quot hodie existunt.

4. Species has miscuit casus, unde totidem quot passim occurrunt varietates.

Hugo Mohl was right in rejecting Heufler's assumption that a view resembling the modern theory of descent was contained in these paragraphs. It must be plain to any one who knows the ideas of Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Cesalpino, within the sphere of which Linnaeus is here moving, what he understands by his 'vegetabile medullare' and 'corticale'; that he does not for a moment mean a plant of simplest organisation, but that both expressions indicate only the original elements of vegetation which the Creator, according to Linnaeus, united to one another at the first. He assumed that plants of the highest and of the lowest grades of organisation were originally created at the same time and alongside of one another; no new class-plants were afterwards created, but from the mingling together of the existing ones by the act of the Creator generically distinct forms were produced, and the natural mingling of these gave birth to species, while varieties were mere chance deviations from species. But it is to be noticed that in these minglings or hybridisations the woody substance of the one form which supplies the pollen is united with the pith-substance of the other form, whose pistil is thus fertilised; and so in these supposed crossings it is always the two original elements of the plant, the medullary and the cortical, which are mingled together.