Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/60

 more difficult operations of the mind simply by not attempting them.

There was one man indeed in Germany who studied the vegetable kingdom in the first half of the 17th century in the spirit of Cesalpino before him, but who, like Cesalpino, found no honour among contemporary botanists. This man was the well-known philosopher Joachim Jung, who invented a comparative terminology for the parts of plants, and occupied himself with critical enquiries into the theory of the system, the naming of species and other subjects, embodying their results in a long array of aphorisms. Free from the genius-stifling burden which the knowledge of individual species had become, a man possessed of varied accomplishments and a well-trained mind, Jung was better qualified than the professed botanists to see what was wanted in botany and would advance it—a phenomenon more than once repeated in the history of the science. But his results remained unknown to all except his immediate pupils, till Ray admitted them into his great work on plants in 1693, and made them the foundation of his own theoretical botany. Enriched by Ray's good morphological remarks, Jung's terminology passed to Linnaeus, who adopted it as he adopted every thing useful that literature offered him, improving it here and there, but impairing its spirit by his dry systematising manner.

The labours of the botanists of Germany and the Netherlands during the 17th century, which culminated in Kaspar Bauhin, were not without important influence upon the development of systematic botany which began with Cesalpino. When Cesalpino wrote the work which forms an epoch in the science, he was perhaps unacquainted with the natural classification of de l'Obel (1576) at least there is nothing in his book which shows that he had seen it; it appears even as though he had made the discovery independently, that there is an actual connection of relationship among plants expressed in their organisation as a whole; it is at any rate certain that this fact