doctrine of sexuality, we find this sophistical style of reasoning still more copiously displayed in the essay entitled 'Sponsalia Plantarum' in the 'Amoenitates' (i. p. 77), and in a worse form still in the essay, 'Plantae Hybridae' (Amoen. iii. p. 29). That Linnaeus had not the remotest conception of the way in which the truth of a hypothetical fact is proved on the principles of strict inductive investigation is shown by these and many other examples, and by his enquiry into the seeds of mosses (Amoen. ii. p. 266), upon which he prided himself not a little, but which is really inconceivably bad even for that time (1750). It was not Linnaeus' habit to occupy himself with what we should call an enquiry; whatever escaped the first critical glance he left quietly alone; it did not occur to him to examine into the causes of the phenomena that interested him; he classified them and had done with them; as for instance in his 'Somnus Plantarum,' as he called the periodical movements of plants. We cannot read much of the 'Philosophia Botanica' or the 'Amoenitates' without feeling that we are transported into the literature of the middle ages by the kind of scholastic sophistry which is all that his argumentation amounts to; and yet these works of Linnaeus date from the middle of the last century, from a time when Malpighi, Grew, Camerarius, and Hales had already carried out their model investigations, and his contemporaries Duhamel, Koelreuter, and others were experimenting in true scientific manner. This peculiarity in Linnaeus explains why men like Buffon, Albert Haller, and Koelreuter treated him with a certain contempt; and also why his strict adherents in Germany, who lived on his writings and were unable to separate what was really good in him from his mode of reasoning, came to make their own botany like anything rather than a science of nature. Linnaeus was in fact a dangerous guide for weak minds, for his curious logic, among the worst to be met with in the scholastic writers, was combined with the most brilliant powers of description; the enormous extent of his knowledge of par-
