Flora Unveiled

370 i Flora Unveiled

applied his classifications to indigenous and regional plants of more remote areas. ...

In 1760 James Lee issued his Introduction to Botany, a pioneering book about the

Linnaean system. It consists of translated extracts from Linnaeus’s writings. ... [It]

was an early Linnaean best- seller and remained a standard introductory work for fifty

years.^56

Jean Jacques Rousseau, initially at least, was so smitten with the Linnaean sexual system that
he sent a message to Linnaeus as follows: “Tell him I know of no greater man on earth.” As noted
by Alexandra Cook, Rousseau referred more often to Linnaeus in his Confessions and Rêveries
than to any other botanist.^57 Like Linnaeus, Rousseau frequently rhapsodized about the natu-
ral world with a near religious fervor. He was a forerunner of the Romantic movement, with
a particular interest in plants. In a series of eight letters addressed to a young mother who had
written to him for advice on a suitable subject of scientific study for her daughter, Rousseau rec-
ommended plants and provided her with a summary of the basic concepts of botany, although
he discretely omitted Linnaeus’s sexual system as being unsuitable for children.^58 Published
as Lettres élémentaires sur la botanique (1771– 1773), these letters were translated into English
by the British botanist Thomas Martyn and supplemented with twenty- four additional letters
“fully explaining the system of Linnaeus.” It was published in 1785 as Letters on the Elements of
Botany and “went through eight editions over the next thirty years.” ^59

The Peloria Bombshell: Speciation and the Matrilineal

Descent of Plant Genera

John Ray, in Historia Plantarum (1686), was the first to define species as a group of plants
capable of propagating themselves by seed, such that their “distinguishing features” were
preserved. He also recognized that species give rise to varieties, which exhibit minor varia-
tions from the parental type while retaining the species’ “distinguishing features”:

Thus, no matter what variations occur in the individuals or the species, if they spring

from the seed of one and the same plant, they are accidental variations and not such

as to distinguish a species ... ; one species never springs from the seed of another nor

vice versa.^60

For most of his career, Linnaeus adhered closely to Ray’s definitions of species and vari-
eties, and, like Ray, he believed in the fixity of species and rejected the ancient idea of the
transmutation of one species into another. He considered varieties to be the result of “acci-
dents” caused by local environmental conditions, such as soil or temperature. Based on the
assumption that varieties did not breed true, Linnaeus excluded them from his classifica-
tion scheme.^61
Even without including varieties, the sheer magnitude of the number of species on earth,
and the diversity of their habitats, meant that they could not possibly have been created en
masse in the Garden of Eden. In an attempt to reconcile the biblical account of Creation
with the vast number and diversity of plants, Linnaeus postulated that Paradise was a tropi-
cal island containing mountains tall enough to generate a wide range of microclimates and
habitats. Initially, the island was the only landmass on earth, but at some point the sea
receded, gradually exposing all the continents. By the time of Adam and Eve’s expulsion,