Even Linnaeus agreed with this view in
his first treatises and in his "Philosophical Botany" he still kept to
the idea that all genera had been created at once with the beginning of
life.
Afterwards Linnaeus changed his opinion on this important point, and
adopted species as the units of the system. He declared them to be the
created forms, and by this decree, at once reduced the genera to the
rank of artificial groups. Linnaeus was well aware that this conception
was wholly arbitrary, and that even the species are not real indivisible
entities. But he simply forbade the study of lesser subdivisions. At his
time he was quite justified in doing so, because the first task of the
systematic botanists was the clearing up of the chaos of forms and the
bringing of them into connection with their real allies.
Linnaeus himself designated the subdivisions of the species as
varieties, but in doing so he followed two clearly distinct principles.
In some cases his species were real plants, and the varieties seemed to
be derived from them by [35] some simple changes. They were subordinated
to the parent-species. In other cases his species were groups of lesser
forms of equal value, and it was not possible to discern which was the
primary and which were the derivatives.
These two methods of subdivision seem in the main, and notwithstanding
their relatively imperfect application in many single examples, to
correspond with two really distinct cases.
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