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What Goethe awoke to when he met Linnaeus's attempt at systematizing the plant kingdom was the old problem of whether the study of nature should proceed from the parts to the whole or from the whole to the parts.
But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus's express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.
Thus the generic name given all members of the cat tribe being Felis, the name Felis leo designates the lion; Felis pardus, the leopard; Felis domestica, the house cat, and so on. This seems perfectly simple and natural now, but to understand how great a reform the binomial nomenclature introduced we have but to consult the work of Linnaeus's predecessors. A single illustration will suffice.
There stands his bust; but the remembrance of himself, his home, his own little garden where is it most vivid? Lead us thither. On yonder side of Fyri's rivulet, where the street forms a declivity, where red-painted, wooden houses boast their living grass roofs, as fresh as if they were planted terraces, lies Linnaeus's garden. We stand within it. How solitary! how overgrown!
While still at school, one of his teachers made him a present of 'Linnaeus's System of Nature; and for more than ten years this constituted his library of natural history. At eighteen he was offered the situation of tutor in a family residing near Fecamp, in Normandy. Living close to the sea-shore, he was brought face to face with the wonders of marine life.
Technical terms are absolutely necessary to scientific progress, and particularly so in botany, where obscurity, ambiguity, or prolixity in descriptions are fatally misleading. Linnaeus's work contains something like a thousand terms, whose meanings and uses are carefully explained.
But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus's express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.
The projector of the subscription then explained to him, that the purposed inscription was, that the monument was erected only by friends and disciples, and King Gustavus answered: "And am not I also one of Linnaeus's disciples?" The monument was raised, and a hall built in the botanical garden, under splendid trees.
Augustine's Confessions; Benvenuto Cellini's Life; Montaigne's Essays; Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Memoirs; Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz; Rousseau's Confessions; Linnaeus's Diary; Gibbon's, Hume's, Franklin's, Burns's, Alfieri's, Goethe's, and Haydon's Autobiographies.
For when Goethe, himself searching for a way of bringing the confusing multiplicity of plant phenomena into a comprehensive system, met with the Linnaean system, he was, despite his admiration for the thoroughness and ingenuity of Linnaeus's work, repelled by his method.
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