Species and the Birth of Modern Science 107Gasking mentions that Ray was a preformationist, although he rejected Leeuwenhoek’s
sperm-based version, in favor of the egg-based one that was more traditional.^268
The kind of mutabilism that existed immediately prior to Lamarck and Erasmus
Darwin, excepting that of Pierre Maupertuis, was the kind that Linnaeus allowed—
species could be formed by hybridization of existing species. God, of course, formed
the original stock, but new forms could arise, especially in plants, by mixing them.
There was no open-ended mutabilism. However, it is equally clear that essentialism
is not directly tied into the origination of xism.
Amundson rightly argues that xism was a precondition for the Natural System,
which was itself a precondition for evolutionary theory. But that is not, of course,
why it was adopted. Linnaeus did not seek to establish a natural system (not in the
Systema naturae, at any rate), although his scheme came to be known later as the
Natural System,^269 as a result of its title. His xism was probably more a function of
his piety than of his taxonomic concerns. So, it may be that xism was successful
simply because it was consonant with the tenor of the times, and because it came
along with Linnaeus’ success in establishing taxonomic nomenclature. Or it may
be that Ray’s institution of the natural theology movement was the more impor-
tant, seeing nature as the book in which God had written. Either way, xism comes
into prominence around the end of the seventeenth century, and not in the time of
Aristotle.
So we should be wary of papers like Zirkle’s, and claims that mutabilism was rife
before Linnaeus or Ray. In fact, lacking the basic conception of a biological kind
(different from any other kind) and still hazy on the mechanisms and behaviors of
generation (including spontaneous generation), the pre-Linnaeans tended to use the
kind terms genus, species, varietas, and formas informally, as we would use “sort,”
“kind,” “variety,” and “form.” Grand conclusions cannot be drawn from this.
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(^268) Gasking 1967, 43, 56, see also Raven 1953.
(^269) Sm it h 1821.