Yet it is important, in the interest of historical truth, to point out that even in these things which constitute his peculiar work—specifically, in his reformation in taxonomy, nomenclature and terminology—Linnæus was in no respect a pioneer or an originator. It was his good fortune to be able to develop and carry through suggestions and outlines of procedure which had been made by his seventeenth-century precursors, and to exploit to the utmost an abundant legacy of botanical knowledge, methodological ideas, and botanical interest which had come down to his generation, Nothing, indeed, could be farther from the truth than the notion which appears to have wide popular currency, that there was little botanical study or knowledge worth mentioning before Linnæus. It is, on the contrary, eminently a case where vixerunt fortes ante Agamemnona. Any who suppose sixteenth and seventeenth century botany to be a negligible quantity will find it instructive to examine the shelves of the library of the Paris Jardin des Plantes; or to remember that Jean Bauhin's "Historia universalis plantarum" (1660), consisting of forty books, contained descriptions of some 5,000 plants, with 3,500 figures, and cost the equivalent of about $18,000 to produce—or that, a little later, Ray's "Historia plantarum generalis" gave a classified arrangement and description of 11,700 plants.[1] And while Linnæus assuredly gave, as has been said, a great impulsion to the popular and fashionable interest in botany and zoology, it was an interest which was extremely well developed before his time—which, in fact, made his own work and his own contemporary fame possible. It was not through his influence first that states and monarchs learned the propriety of establishing botanical gardens. The Jardin royal du Louvre, for example, was established by Henri IV. in 1590, and the Jardin des Plantes was founded in 1626. By the middle of the seventeenth century both public and private gardens, often with scientific establishments connected with them, were becoming fairly common. And, as I have said, the particular reforms through which chiefly Linnæus achieved his results were essentially not discoveries nor innovations of his own. It will be profitable to note
- ↑ These figures are taken from Hoefer's "Histoire de la Botanique," 1872.
