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Updated: May 11, 2025
Linnaeus was a naturalist in this wide sense, and his 'Systema Naturae' was a work upon natural history, in the broadest acceptation of the term; in it, that great methodising spirit embodied all that was known in his time of the distinctive characters of minerals, animals, and plants.
He had infinite quickness of apprehension, a prodigious memory, and a certain rectifying and methodising power of understanding, which extracted something precious out of all that was presented to it. His stores of miscellaneous knowledge were immense, and yet less astonishing than the command he had at all times over them.
Besides sifting, testing, and methodising with rare patience and judgment what had been previously brought to light, he left, as the saying is, no stone unturned under which anything to illustrate his subject might possibly be found. Navarrete has done all that industry and acumen could do, and it is no fault of his if he has not given us what we want.
But though there neither are, nor can be, any precise invariable rules for the exercise or the acquisition of those great qualities, yet we may as truly say that they always operate in proportion to our attention in observing the works of nature, to our skill in selecting, and to our care in digesting, methodising, and comparing our observations.
If we set aside the barbarity and customs of the Romans as heathens, and take them as a civil government, we must allow they were the pattern of the whole world for improvement and increase of arts and learning, civilising and methodising nations and countries conquered by their valour; and if this was one of their great cares, that consideration ought to move something.
Linnaeus was a naturalist in this wide sense, and his 'Systema Naturae' was a work upon natural history, in the broadest acceptation of the term; in it, that great methodising spirit embodied all that was known in his time of the distinctive characters of minerals, animals, and plants.
His prodigious memory retained with iron tenacity every word or phrase once acquired; his power of methodising, by the very exercise, became more ready and more perfect with each new advance in the study; and, above all, a faculty which seemed peculiar to himself, and which can hardly be described as other than instinctive, of seizing and comprehending by a single effort the general outlines of the grammatical structure of a language from a few faint indications as a comparative anatomist will build up an entire skeleton from a single bone enabled him to overleap all the difficulties which beset the path of ordinary linguists, and to attain, almost by intuition, at least so much of the required language as enabled him to interchange thought with sufficient freedom and distinctness for the purposes of this religious observance, which is so important in the eyes of Catholics.
Linnaeus was a naturalist in this wide sense, and his "Systema Naturae" was a work upon natural history, in the broadest acceptation of the term; in it, that great methodising spirit embodied all that was known in his time of the distinctive characters of minerals, animals, and plants.
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