Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/512

506 from the current view of the originality of Linnæus's work as reformer and organizer of botanical knowledge, we need not on that account greatly lower our estimate of its actual importance in the history of science. And yet we must, to get a just picture, always remember the character, as well as the magnitude, of that work; we must remember that it was, all but exclusively, form, system, nomenclature and specific observations that Linnæus contributed to the biological sciences, rather than fundamental discoveries, pregnant hypotheses or illuminating general ideas. Even in the presence of the impressive picture of the solid results of Linnæus's life-work drawn by the French historian of these sciences, one can not help recalling a caustic remark—which I have already elsewhere cited—of Linnæus's contemporary, Maupertuis, then president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Maupertuis spoke of zoology; but we may generalize his observation: "All these treatises on plants and animals which we as yet have," he says (about 1750), "are—even the most methodical of them—no better than pictures pretty to look at; in order to make of natural history a veritable science, naturalists must apply themselves to researches which can make us acquainted not simply with the form of this or that organism, but with the general processes of nature in the production of organisms and the conservation of them." Towards making natural history a veritable science in this sense Linnæus did relatively little; but it is not quite true to say that he did nothing at all. Towards the discovery or the establishment of two generalized laws respecting the processes of nature in the production and the perpetuation of vegetal organisms Linnæus made some contribution; and of these something ought briefly to be said, the more because they are often neglected in the accounts of Linnæus's work.

1. Although, as has been remarked, the fact of sexuality in plants had been noted by a number of great naturalists before 1718, the doctrine was not, in Linnæus's youth, at all generally accepted. It was possible at the beginning of the eighteenth century for a botanist so eminent as Tournefort to combat and ridicule the idea; and for the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg, so late as 1759, to offer a prize for the best argument either for or against the doctrine of sex in vegetables. Linnæus gave the weight of his authority, as well as of some new experimental evidence, to the affirmative of this question. By him the fact may be said to have been finally established; and by his sexual system of classification the idea was made a familiar and fundamental common-place of even popular botanical knowledge.

2. By his doctrine of the "Prolepsis Plantarum" and "Metamorphosis Plantarum"—which one of his disciples declared to be "the most subtle discovery of any which can be put forward by the investigators of nature in our age," but which there lacks space to set forth