it anything that was fundamentally and essentially new; all that had been developed in systematic botany from Cesalpino to Tournefort culminated in him, and the results, which he put together in a very original form and with the power of a master, were no more unfruitful for the further development of botany than the contents of Kaspar Bauhin’s works for the successors of Cesalpino. Whoever carefully compares the works of Cesalpino, Jung, Morison, Ray, Bachmann, and Tournefort with Linnaeus, ‘Fundamenta Botanica’ (1736), his ‘Classes Plantarum’ (1738), and his ‘Philosophia Botanica’ (1751), must be thoroughly convinced that the ideas on which his theories are based are to be found scattered up and down in the works of his predecessors; further, whoever has traced the history of the sexual theory from the time of Camerarius (1694), must allow that Linnaeus added nothing new to it, though he contributed essentially to its recognition, and that even after Koelreuter’s labours he continued to entertain some highly obscure and even mystical notions on the subject. But that which gave Linnaeus so overwhelming an importance for his own time was the skilful way in which he gathered up all that had been done before him; this fusing together of the scattered acquisitions of the past is the great and characteristic merit of Linnaeus. Cesalpino was the first who introduced Aristotelian modes of thought into botany; his system was intended to be a natural one, but it was in reality extremely unnatural; Linnaeus, in whose works the profound impression which he had received from Cesalpino is everywhere to be traced, retained all that was important in his predecessor’s views, but perceived at the same time what no one before him had perceived, that the method pursued by Cesalpino, Morison, Ray, Tournefort, and Bachmann could never do justice to those natural affinities which it was their object to discover, and that in this way only an artificial though very serviceable arrangement could be attained, while the exhibition of natural affinities must be sought by other means.