Jump to content

Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/122

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
102
Artificial Systems and Terminology of
[Book I.

a certain feeling for natural affinity is shown in the establishment of his seven families, Fungi, Algae, Mosses, Ferns, Grasses, Palms, and Plants properly so-called. Moreover in paragraph 163 of the 'Philosophia Botanica,' he carries out the division of the whole vegetable kingdom into Acotyledons, Monocotyledons, and Polycotyledons with their subdivisions very admirably; and thus we see him continually impelled towards a natural arrangement, but never bestowing upon it the necessary labour and thought.

And so two different conceptions of a system of plants continued to subsist side by side with each other in the mind of Linnaeus; one more superficial, and adapted for practical use, expressed in his artificial sexual system, and one more profound and scientifically valuable, embodied in his fragment and in the natural groups above-mentioned.

The same may be said also of Linnaeus' morphological views; here, too, a more superficial pursued its way along with a more profound conception. He formed his terminology of the parts of plants for practical use in describing them, and convenient as it is, it seems nevertheless shallow or superficial, because its foundations are not more deeply laid in the comparative study of forms. But we discover from very various passages in his writings that he felt the need of a more profound conception of plant-form, and what he was able to say on the subject he put together under the head of 'metamorphosis plantarum.' His doctrine of metamorphosis is entirely based on the views of Cesalpino, with which we have already become acquainted, though he did not adopt them in their original form, but endeavoured to develop them in true Cesalpinian fashion; for on the one hand he derived leaves and parts of flowers from the tissues of the stem, and on the other conceived of the parts of the flower as only altered leaves. This doctrine of metamorphosis appears in somewhat confused form in the last page of his 'Philosophia Botanica.' There he says that the whole of the