Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/514

508 an unceasing warfare or competition, as a result of which the otherwise excessive multiplication of each kind is prevented and the equilibrium of nature is preserved. But all these Just observations lead Linnæus to nothing more useful to science than the quam pulchre! We are invited to see in the arrangement whereby the lion saves the lamb from the Malthusian inconvenience of over-multiplication simply an evidence of design in nature. It never occurs to the great naturalist to consider that, as Maupertuis put it, "since only those creatures could survive in whose organization a certain degree of adaptation was present, there is nothing extraordinary in the fact that such adaptation is found in all the species that now exist." Looking upon the same general class of facts as those which were to be considered by "Wallace and Darwin, Linnæus finds in them nothing but the occasion for the wholesale introduction of teleological considerations, in place of causal explanations. In setting the example of such a proceeding, Linnæus certainly did much to hold biology back from its proper methods and its proper problems. In this, as in his general failure to take a philosophic view of his subject, his mental attitude was peculiarly uncongenial to the greatest intellect—if not the greatest botanist—of those whom he largely influenced. Goethe kept up a lifelong protest against all purely descriptive science and all introduction of teleological notions into the explanation of natural phenomena. And it is from Goethe in his old age that I may, in closing, quote a somewhat severe, but not unilluminating, remark upon the master of the poet's early botanical studies; since it contains a sort of philosophical pun, it is necessary to give it in the German:

Eine zwar niedere doch schon ideelle Unternehmung des Menschen, ist das Zählen, wodurch im gemeinen Leben so vieles verrichtet wird; die grosse Bequemlichkeit jedoch, die allgemeine Fasslichkeit und Erreichbarkeit giebt dem Ordnen auch in den Wissenscbaften Eingang und Beifall. Das Linnéche System erlangte eben durch diese Gemeinheit seine Allgemeinheit; doch widerstrebte es einer höheren Einsicht mehr, als dass es seiche förderte.

Yet if Linnæus was not qualified to lead biology into the promised land of that "higher insight"—if he even somewhat delayed its progress thither—it must still be said that he left all the sciences with which he dealt incomparably better provisioned for that progress than they would have been without his work. He left to them an intensified ardor for the scrutiny of all the phenomena of nature, a better command of their own materials, and a greatly enriched and better ordered store of those concrete facts out of which, in time, scientific generalizations often almost spontaneously develop, and by which they must always eventually be tested.