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 Cesalpino comes before us, in strong contrast with the simple-minded empiricism of the German fathers of botany, as the thinker in presence of the vegetable world. Their main task was the amassing descriptions of individual plants. Cesalpino made the material gathered by experience the subject of earnest reflection; he sought especially to obtain universals from particulars, important principles from sensuous perceptions; but as his forms of thought were entirely Aristotelian, it was inevitable that his interpretation of the facts should introduce into them much that would have to be got rid of subsequently by the inductive method. Cesalpino differs also from the German botanists in another respect; he did not rest satisfied with the general impression produced by the plants, but carefully examined the separate parts and paid attention to the small and concealed organs; he was the first who converted observation into real scientific research; and thus we find in him a remarkable union of inductive natural science and Aristotelian philosophy, a mixture which gives a peculiar character to the theoretical efforts of his successors down to Linnaeus.

Cesalpino was moreover much before his time in his mode of contemplating the vegetable kingdom, seeking always for philosophical combinations and comprehensive points of view. His work which appeared in 1583 exercised no perceptible influence on his contemporaries; a trace of such influence only may be seen in Kaspar Bauhin thirty or forty years later, while the work of the botanists who followed Bauhin down to 1670 was confined everywhere to increasing the knowledge of individual plants. With this object travels were undertaken after 1600 to all parts of the world; many new botanic gardens were added to the few which had been founded in the 16th century—as at Giessen in 1617, at Paris in 1620, at Jena in 1629, at Oxford in 1632, at Amsterdam in 1646, at Utrecht in 1650. Instead of endeavouring to embrace with their labours the whole vegetable kingdom, botanists preferred to devote themselves to the examination of