Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/507

Rh it came to be a field in which many minds, of all orders of ability, could do useful work, and could make their work dovetail into the work of others in such wise that each was conscious of having contributed a definite part to an immense and impressive edifice of an intelligible outline and design. Alike by the superior convenience of his classification, nomenclature and terminology, by the force and serious enthusiasm of his personality, and by the example of his admirably exact observation, Linnaeus stimulated a prodigious amount of ardent and careful botanical and zoological research on the part of others. His own pupils went out, literally by the score, not only over Europe, but to the uttermost parts of the earth, to collect new species and study geographical distribution. A number of these young enthusiasts, whose names are honorably recorded by one of Linnæus's biographers, lost their lives in these expeditions. The eight volumes of Linnæus's "Amœnitates Academicæ" contain 186 dissertations by almost as many of his pupils, the subject and treatment being in nearly every case suggested, and the results corrected, by Linnæus himself; most of these contain contributions of valuable—and many contain what were in their day highly original—botanical, zoological or mineralogical data. Nor was the effect of Linnæus's simplification and systematization of botany limited to the setting of other and younger men of science to work. His efforts also notably increased the general vogue of botany, as a result of which it long enjoyed an exceptional popularity and an unusual amplitude of endowment among the sciences. This aspect of Linnæus's work is effectively presented—all the more effectively for a considerable touch of rhetorical exaggeration—by Magdeleine de Saint-Agy in his continuation of Cuvier's "Histoire des Sciences Naturelles" (1845); the passage illustrates so well, if not precisely, what Linnæus did, at least what he had the credit of doing, that I venture to translate it.

The influence of Linnæus, says this historian, was not limited to the investigations and voyages which he caused to be made; in imitation of him, similar voyages and investigations were ordered made by several states. Sweden, being a small and poor country, had no great means for multiplying such expeditions; but England, France and Russia had them carried out in great numbers; and Linnæus during the last years of his life had the pleasure, as Condorcet puts it, of seeing nature interrogated on all sides in his name. There was no class of people—even to princes—who did not busy themselves with natural history, and above all with botany—since this science presents none of the difficulties of anatomy and since the method of Linnæus is of a simplicity which renders it accessible to everybody. . . Botany thus became universally familiar. Those who were fond of gardening multiplied the varieties of their plants, since they could now know the names of them without being Latin scholars, and since gardeners could now understand one another when referring to the plants they cultivated. All gardens, both botanical and pleasure gardens, were filled with a multitude of plants which rich folk had brought at great expense from foreign