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were proposed as to the nature of plants, their organisation8 or mutual9 relations; the only point of interest was the knowledge of individual forms and of their medicinal virtues.
The descriptions were at first extremely inartistic and unmethodical; but the effort to make them as exact and clear as was possible led from time to time to perceptions of truth, that came unsought and lay far removed from the object originally in view. It was remarked that many of the plants which Dioscorides had described in his Materia Medica do not grow wild in Germany, France, Spain, and England, and that conversely very many plants grow in these countries, which were evidently unknown to the ancient writers; it became apparent at the same time that many plants have points of resemblance to one another, which have nothing to do with their medicinal powers or with their importance to agriculture and the arts. In the effort to promote the knowledge of plants for practical purposes by careful description of individual forms, the impression forced itself on the mind of the observer, that there are various natural groups of plants which have a distinct resemblance to one another in form and in other characteristics. It was seen that there were other natural alliances in the vegetable world, beside the three great divisions of trees, shrubs10, and herbs adopted by Aristotle and Theophrastus. The first perception of natural groups is to be found in Bock, and later herbals show that the natural connection between such plants as occur together in the groups of Fungi11, Mosses12, Ferns, Coniferae, Umbelliferae, Compositae, Labiatae, Papilionaceae was distinctly felt, though it was by no means clearly understood how this connection was actually expressed; the fact of natural affinity13 presented itself unsought as an incidental and indefinite impression, to which no great value was at first attached. The recognition of these groups required no antecedent philosophic14 reflection or conscious attempt to classify the objects in the vegetable world; they present themselves to the unprejudiced eye as naturally as do the groups of mammals, birds, reptiles15,
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fishes and worms in the animal kingdom. The real resemblance of the organisms in such groups is unconsciously accepted by the mind through the association of ideas, and it is not till this involuntary mental act, which in itself requires no effort of the understanding, is accomplished16, that any necessity is felt for obtaining a clearer idea of the phenomenon, and the sense of this necessity is the first step to intentional17 systematic18 enquiry. The series of botanical works published in Germany and the Netherlands from 1530 to 1623, from Brunfels to Kaspar Bauhin, shows very plainly how this perception of a grouping by affinity in the vegetable kingdom grew more and more distinct; but it also shows how these men merely followed an instinctive20 feeling in the matter, and made no enquiry into the cause of the relationship which they perceived.
Nevertheless a great step in advance was thus taken; all the foreign matter introduced into the description of plants by medical superstition21 and practical considerations was seen to be of secondary importance, and was indeed altogether thrown aside by Kaspar Bauhin; the fact of natural affinity, the vivifying principle of all botanical research, came to the front in its place, and awakened22 the desire to distinguish more exactly whatever was different, and to bring together more carefully all that was like in kind. Thus the idea of natural affinity in plants is not a discovery of any single botanist23, but is a product, and to some extent an incidental product, of the practice of describing plants.
But before the exhibition of the natural affinity gave birth to the first efforts at classification on the part of de l’Obel (Lobelius) and afterwards of Kaspar Bauhin, the Italian botanist Cesalpino (1583) had already attempted a system of the vegetable kingdom on a very different plan. He was led to distribute all vegetable forms into definite groups not by the fact of natural affinity, which impressed itself on the minds of the botanists24 of Germany and the Netherlands through involuntary association
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of ideas, but by philosophical25 reflection. Trained in the philosophy which flourished in Italy in the 16th century, deeply imbued26 with the doctrines27 of Aristotle, and practised in all subtleties29 of the schools, Cesalpino was not the man to surrender himself quietly to the influence of nature on the unconscious powers of the mind; on the contrary, he sought from the first to bring all that he learnt from the writings of others and from his own acute observation of the forms of plants into subjection to his own understanding. Hence he approached the task of the scientific botanist in an entirely30 different way from that of de l’Obel and Kaspar Bauhin. It was by philosophical reflections on the nature of the plant and on the substantial and accidental value of its parts, according to Aristotelian conceptions, that he was led to distribute the vegetable kingdom into groups and sub-groups founded on definite marks.
This difference in the origin of the systematic efforts of Cesalpino on the one hand and of de l’Obel and Bauhin on the other is unmistakably apparent; the Germans were instinctively31 led by the resemblances to the conception of natural groups, Cesalpino on the contrary framed his groups on the sharp distinctions which resulted from the application of predetermined marks; all the faults in Bauhin’s system are due to incorrect judgment33 of resemblances, those of Cesalpino to incorrectness in distinguishing.
But the main point of difference lies in the fact, that the system is presented by de l’Obel and Bauhin without any statement of the principles on which it rests; in their account of it the association of ideas is left to perfect itself in the mind of the reader, as it grew up before in the authors themselves. De l’Obel and Bauhin are like artists, who convey their own impressions to others not by words and descriptions, but by pictorial34 representations; Cesalpino, on the other hand, addresses himself at once to the understanding of his reader and shows him on philosophic grounds that there must be a classification, and states the principles of this classifi
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cation; it was on philosophic grounds also that he made the characters of the seed and the fruit the basis of his arrangement, while the German botanists, paying little attention to the organs of fructification, were chiefly influenced by the general impression produced by the plant, by its habit as the phrase now is.
The historians of botany have overlooked the real state of the case as here presented, or have not described it with sufficient emphasis; due attention has not been paid to the fact, that systematic botany, as it began to develope in the 17th century, contained within itself from the first two opposing elements; on the one hand the fact of a natural affinity indistinctly felt, which was brought out by the botanists of Germany and the Netherlands, and on the other the desire, to which Cesalpino first gave expression, of arriving by the path of clear perception at a classification of the vegetable kingdom which should satisfy the understanding. These two elements of systematic investigation35 were entirely incommensurable; it was not possible by the use of arbitrary principles of classification which satisfied the understanding to do justice at the same time to the instinctive feeling for natural affinity which would not be argued away. This incommensurability between natural affinity and a priori grounds of classification is everywhere expressed in the systems embracing the whole vegetable kingdom, which were proposed up to 1736, and which including those of Cesalpino and Linnaeus were not less in number than fifteen. It is the custom to describe these systems, of which those of Cesalpino, Morison, Ray, Bachmann (Rivinus), and Tournefort are the most important, by the one word ‘artificial’[1]; but it was by no means the intention of those men to propose classifications of the vegetable kingdom which should be merely artificial, and do no more than offer an
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arrangement adapted for ready reference. It is true that the botanists of the 17th century and Linnaeus himself often spoke36 of facility of use as a great object to be kept in view in constructing a system; but every one who brought out a new system did so really because he believed that his own was a better expression of natural affinities37 than those of his predecessors38. If some like Ray and Morison were more influenced by the wish to exhibit natural affinities by means of a system, and others as Tournefort and Magnol thought more of framing a perspicuous and handy arrangement of plants, yet it is plain from the objections which every succeeding systematist39 makes to his predecessors, that the exhibition of natural affinities was more or less clearly in the minds of all as the main object of the system; only they all employed the same wrong means for securing this end, for they fancied that natural affinities could be brought out by the use of a few easily recognised marks, whose value for systematic purposes had been arbitrarily determined32. This opposition40 between means and end runs through all systematic botany from Cesalpino in 1583 to Linnaeus in 1736.
But a new departure dates from Linnaeus himself, since he was the first who clearly perceived the existence of this discord41. He was the first who said distinctly, that there is a natural system of plants, which could not be established by the use of predetermined marks, as had been previously42 attempted, and that even the rules for framing it were still undiscovered. In his Fragments of the date of 1738, he gave a list of sixty-five groups or orders, which he regarded provisionally as cycles of natural affinity, but he did not venture to give their characteristic marks. These groups, though better separated and more naturally arranged than those of Kaspar Bauhin, were like his founded solely43 on a refined feeling for the relative resemblances and graduated differences that were observed in comparing plants with one another, and this is no less true of the enumeration44 of natural families attempted by Bernard de Jussieu in
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1759. To such of these small groups of related forms as had not been already named both Linnaeus and Jussieu gave names, which they took not from certain marks, but from the name of a genus in each group. But this mode of naming plainly expresses the idea which from that time forward prevailed in systematic botany, that there is a common type lying at the foundation of each natural group, from which all its forms though specifically distinct can be derived45, as the forms of a crystal may all be derived from one fundamental form,—an idea which was also expressed by Pyrame de Candolle in 1819.
But botanists could not rest content with merely naming natural groups; it was necessary to translate the indistinct feeling, which had suggested the groups of Linnaeus and Bernard de Jussieu, into the language of science by assigning clearly recognised marks; and this was from this time forward the task of systematists from Antoine Laurent de Jussieu and de Candolle to Endlicher and Lindley. But it cannot be denied, that later systematists repeatedly committed the fault of splitting up natural groups of affinity by artificial divisions and of bringing together the unlike, as Cesalpino and the botanists of the 17th century had done before them, though continued practice was always leading to a more perfect exhibition of natural affinities.
But while natural relationship was thus becoming more and more the guiding idea in the minds of systematists, and the experience of centuries was enforcing the lesson, that predetermined grounds of classification could not do justice to natural affinities, the fact of affinity became itself more unintelligible46 and mysterious. It seemed impossible to give a clear and precise definition of the conception, the exhibition of which was felt to be the proper object of all efforts to discover the natural system, and which continued to be known by the name of affinity. A sense of this mystery is expressed in the sentence of Linnaeus:
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‘It is not the character (the marks used to characterise the genus) which makes the genus, but the genus which makes the character;’ but the very man, who first distinctly recognised this difficulty in the natural system, helped to increase it by his doctrine28 of the constancy of species. This doctrine appears in Linnaeus in an unobtrusive form, rather as resulting from daily experience and liable to be modified by further investigation; but it became with his successors an article of faith, a dogma, which no botanist could even doubt without losing his scientific reputation; and thus during more than a hundred years the belief, that every organic form owes its existence to a separate act of creation and is therefore absolutely distinct from all other forms, subsisted47 side by side with the fact of experience, that there is an intimate tie of relationship between these forms, which can only be imperfectly indicated by definite marks. Every systematist knew that this relationship was something more than mere19 resemblance perceivable by the senses, while thinking men saw the contradiction between the assumption of an absolute difference of origin in species (for that is what is meant by their constancy) and the fact of their affinity. Linnaeus in his later years made some strange attempts to explain away this contradiction; his successors adopted a way of their own; various scholastic48 notions from the 16th century still survived among the systematists, especially after Linnaeus had assumed the lead among them, and it was thought that the dogma of the constancy of species might find especially in Plato’s misinterpreted doctrine of ideas a philosophical justification49, which was the more acceptable because it harmonised well with the tenets of the Church. If, as Elias Fries said in 1835, there is ‘quoddam supranaturale’ in the natural system, namely the affinity of organisms, so much the better for the system; in the opinion of the same writer each division of the system expresses an idea (‘singula sphaera (sectio) ideam quandam exponit’), and all these ideas might easily be explained in their ideal connection as representing the plan of creation. If observation and theoretical considerations occasionally
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suggested objections to such views, these objections were usually little regarded, and in fact reflections of this kind on the real meaning of the natural system did not often make their appearance; the most intelligent men turned away with an uncomfortable feeling from these doubts and difficulties, and preferred to devote their time and powers to the discovery of affinities in individual forms. At the same time it was well understood that the question was one which lay at the foundation of the science. At a later period the researches of Nägeli and others in morphology resulted in discoveries of the greatest importance to systematic botany, and disclosed facts which were necessarily fatal to the hypothesis, that every group in the system represents an idea in the Platonic50 sense; such for instance were the remarkable51 embryological relations, which Hofmeister discovered in 1851, between Angiosperms, Gymnosperms, Vascular52 Cryptogams and Muscineae; nor was it easy to reconcile the fact, that the physiologico-biological peculiarities53 on the one hand and the morphological and systematic characters on the other are commonly quite independent of one another, with the plan of creation as conceived by the systematists. Thus an opposition between true scientific research and the theoretical views of the systematists became more and more apparent, and no one who paid attention to both could avoid a painful feeling of uncertainty54 with respect to this portion of the science. This feeling was due to the dogma of the constancy of species, and to the consequent impossibility of giving a scientific definition of the idea of affinity.
This state of things finally ceased with the appearance of Darwin’s first and best book on the origin of species in 1859; from a multitude of facts, some new, but most of them long well-known, he showed that the constancy of species was no longer an open question; that the doctrine was no result of exact observation, but an article of faith opposed to observation. The establishment of this truth was followed almost as a
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matter of course by the true conception of that which had been hitherto figuratively called affinity; the degrees of affinity expressed in the natural system indicated the different degrees of derivation of the varying progeny55 of common parents; out of affinity taken in a figurative sense arose a real blood-relationship, and the natural system became a table of the pedigree of the vegetable kingdom. Here was the solution of the ancient problem.
Darwin’s theory has this special interest in the history of the science, that it established clearness in the place of obscurity, a scientific principle in place of a scholastic mode of thought, in the domain56 of systematic botany and morphology. Yet Darwin did not effect this change in opposition to the historical development of our science or independently of it; on the contrary his great merit is that he has correctly appreciated the problems long existing in systematic botany and morphology from the point of view of modern research, and has solved them.
That the constancy of species is incompatible57 with the idea of affinity, that the morphological (genetic) nature of organs does not proceed on parallel lines with their physiological58 and functional59 significance, are facts which were known in botany and zoology60 before the time of Darwin; but he was the first to show, that variation and natural selection in the struggle for existence solve these problems, and enable us to conceive of these facts as the necessary effects of known causes; it is at the same time explained, why the natural affinity first recognised by de l’Obel and Kaspar Bauhin cannot be exhibited by the use of predetermined principles of classification, as was attempted by Cesalpino.
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1
virtues
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| 美德( virtue的名词复数 )； 德行； 优点； 长处 | |
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constituents
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| n.选民( constituent的名词复数 )；成分；构成部分；要素 | |
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antiquity
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| n.古老；高龄；古物，古迹 | |
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corrupt
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| v.贿赂，收买；adj.腐败的，贪污的 | |
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illustrated
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| adj. 有插图的，列举的 动词illustrate的过去式和过去分词 | |
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commentators
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| n.评论员( commentator的名词复数 )；时事评论员；注释者；实况广播员 | |
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philological
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| adj.语言学的，文献学的 | |
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organisation
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| n.组织，安排，团体，有机休 | |
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mutual
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| adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的 | |
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shrubs
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| 灌木( shrub的名词复数 ) | |
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fungi
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| n.真菌，霉菌 | |
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mosses
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| n. 藓类, 苔藓植物 名词moss的复数形式 | |
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affinity
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| n.亲和力，密切关系 | |
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philosophic
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| adj.哲学的，贤明的 | |
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reptiles
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| n.爬行动物，爬虫( reptile的名词复数 ) | |
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accomplished
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| adj.有才艺的；有造诣的；达到了的 | |
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intentional
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| adj.故意的，有意（识）的 | |
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systematic
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| adj.有系统的，有计划的，有方法的 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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instinctive
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| adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的 | |
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superstition
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| n.迷信，迷信行为 | |
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awakened
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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botanist
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| n.植物学家 | |
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botanists
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| n.植物学家，研究植物的人( botanist的名词复数 ) | |
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philosophical
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| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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imbued
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| v.使（某人/某事）充满或激起（感情等）( imbue的过去式和过去分词 )；使充满；灌输；激发（强烈感情或品质等） | |
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doctrines
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| n.教条( doctrine的名词复数 )；教义；学说；（政府政策的）正式声明 | |
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doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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subtleties
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| 细微( subtlety的名词复数 )； 精细； 巧妙； 细微的差别等 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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pictorial
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| adj.绘画的；图片的；n．画报 | |
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investigation
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| n.调查，调查研究 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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affinities
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| n.密切关系( affinity的名词复数 )；亲近；（生性）喜爱；类同 | |
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predecessors
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| n.前任( predecessor的名词复数 )；前辈；（被取代的）原有事物；前身 | |
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systematist
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| n.组织主义者 | |
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opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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discord
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| n.不和，意见不合，争论，（音乐）不和谐 | |
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previously
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| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
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solely
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| adv.仅仅，唯一地 | |
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enumeration
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| n.计数，列举；细目；详表；点查 | |
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45
derived
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| vi.起源；由来；衍生；导出v.得到( derive的过去式和过去分词 )；（从…中）得到获得；源于；（从…中）提取 | |
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46
unintelligible
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| adj.无法了解的，难解的，莫明其妙的 | |
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47
subsisted
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| v.（靠很少的钱或食物）维持生活，生存下去( subsist的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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48
scholastic
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| adj.学校的，学院的，学术上的 | |
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49
justification
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| n.正当的理由；辩解的理由 | |
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50
platonic
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| adj.精神的；柏拉图（哲学）的 | |
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51
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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52
vascular
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| adj.血管的，脉管的 | |
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53
peculiarities
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| n. 特质, 特性, 怪癖, 古怪 | |
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54
uncertainty
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| n.易变，靠不住，不确知，不确定的事物 | |
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progeny
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| n.后代，子孙；结果 | |
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56
domain
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| n.(活动等)领域，范围；领地，势力范围 | |
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57
incompatible
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| adj.不相容的，不协调的，不相配的 | |
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58
physiological
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| adj.生理学的，生理学上的 | |
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functional
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| adj.为实用而设计的，具备功能的，起作用的 | |
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zoology
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| n.动物学，生态 | |
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