Species

66 Species

Independently of Cesalpino, Caspar (or Kaspar) Bauhin of Switzerland (1550–1624)
organized known scientic names and descriptions of plants into two works (Prodromus
theatri botanici, 1620 and Pinax theatri botanici, 1621), in which the genus–species
arrangement was used, although he did not use it consistently as Linnaeus.^76 Even so,
Bauhin used the common likeness of plant forms as his basis for classication, unlike
Cesalpino’s articial system, which was based on the special characters of what he
considered the “soul” or heart of the plants (hearkening to Aristotle’s De Anima). In his
Phytopinax (1596), Bauhin states in the preface that he has applied one name to each
plant for clarity.^77 Cesalpino tended, according to Nördenskiold,^78 to focus on the fruits
of plants in his classications, a decision that also later inuenced Linnaeus. Both
Cesalpino and Bauhin were transitional between the older herbals tradition in which
classication was either by alphabet or by utility in medicine and cooking.

The Universal Language Project

During the Renaissance, philosophers were more concerned with souls (especially

the rational soul) and knowledge than species, but toward the end neo-Platonism was

revived, particularly at Cambridge University under the general leadership of Ralph

Cudworth and the later title of the “Cambridge Platonists.” This movement was instru-

mental in the establishment of seventeenth-century science in England in particular,^79

and Bishop John Wilkins among others began discussion groups to review recent

experiments and results. One of the movements they continued was that of the search

for a logical system that could ensure a perfectly expressive and complete language.^80

Mary Slaughter has discussed the universal language project at length, and she traces

the inuence of this approach from the medieval herbalists and the heritage of Aristotle.

She noted that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inherited an “essentially

Aristotelian” worldview that determined the way people thought about language.^81 The

theory of language that they developed is founded on the epistemology of Aristotelian

scholasticism—based on analytic differentiation of the topoi, the Categories. The “uni-

versal grammarians” Gerardus Vossius, Juan Caramuel, and Tommaso Campanella of

the sixteenth century in turn gave way to the “universal language projectors” of the sev-

enteenth. These began with the work of Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626), The Advancement

of Learning (1605),^82 in which, Slaughter says, he systematically

described, analyzed and classied Renaissance provinces of knowledge, dividing learn-

ing into the arts of imagination, memory and reason.... Among the subdivisions of the

arts of reason was rhetoric; among its parts Bacon included the Art of Transmission, or

communication.”^83

(^76) Although Sachs 1890, 33–35, thinks he was quite consistent and is dismissive of Linnaeus’s “dry
systematising manner,” 40.
(^77) Arber 1938, 168.
(^78) Nordenskiöld 1929, 193f.
(^79) See Mandelbrote 2007 for an account of how the Cambridge Platonists and the natural theologians
like Wilkins and Boyle interacted.
(^80) Slaughter 1982, Rossi 2000.
(^81) Slaughter 1982, 87.
(^82) Bacon 1913.
(^83) Slaughter 1982, 89.