Sect. 2.—Linnæan Reform of Botanical Terminology.
It must be recollected that I designate as Terminology, the system of terms employed in the description of objects of natural history; while by Nomenclature, I mean the collection of the names of species. The reform of the descriptive part of botany was one of the tasks first attempted by Linnæus; and his terminology was the instrument by which his other improvements were effected.
Though most readers, probably, entertain, at first, a persuasion that a writer ought to content himself with the use of common words in their common sense, and feel a repugnance to technical terms and arbitrary rules of phraseology, as pedantic and troublesome; it is soon found, by the student of any branch of science that, without technical terms and fixed rules, there can be no certain or progressive knowledge. The loose and infantine grasp of common language cannot hold objects steadily enough for scientific examination, or lift them from one stage of generalization to another. They must be secured by the rigid mechanism of a scientific phraseology. This necessity had been felt in all the sciences, from the earliest periods of their progress. But the [390] conviction had never been acted upon so as to produce a distinct and adequate descriptive botanical language. Jung, indeed,[88] had already attempted to give rules and precepts which should answer this purpose; but it was not till the Fundamenta Botanica appeared, that the science could be said to possess a fixed and complete terminology.
[88] Isagoge Phytoscopica, 1679.
To give an account of such a terminology, is, in fact, to give a description of a dictionary and grammar, and is therefore what cannot here be done in detail. Linnæus’s work contains about a thousand terms of which the meaning and application are distinctly explained; and rules are given, by which, in the use of such terms, the botanist may avoid all obscurity, ambiguity, unnecessary prolixity and complexity, and even inelegance and barbarism. Of course the greater part of the words which Linnæus thus recognized had previously existed in botanical writers; and many of them had been defined with technical precision. Thus Jung[89] had already explained what was a composite, what a pinnate leaf; what kind of a bunch of flowers is a spike, a panicle, an umbel, a corymb, respectively. Linnæus extended such distinctions, retaining complete clearness in their separation. Thus, with him, composite leaves are further distinguished as digitate, pinnate, bipinnate, pedate, and so on; pinnate leaves are abruptly so, or with an odd one, or with a tendril; they are pinnate oppositely, alternately, interruptedly, articulately, decursively. Again, the inflorescence, as the mode of assemblage of the flowers is called, may be a tuft (fasciculus), a head (capitulum), a cluster (racemus), a bunch (thyrsus), a panicle, a spike, a catkin (amentum), a corymb, an umbel, a cyme, a whorl (verticillus). And the rules which he gives, though often apparently arbitrary and needless, are found, in practice, to be of great service by their fixity and connexion. By the good fortune of having had a teacher with so much delicacy of taste as Linnæus, in a situation of so much influence, Botany possesses a descriptive language which will long stand as a model for all other subjects.
[89] Sprengel, ii. 28.
It may, perhaps, appear to some persons, that such a terminology as we have here described must be enormously cumbrous; and that, since the terms are arbitrarily invested with their meaning, the invention of them requires no knowledge of nature. With respect to the former doubt, we may observe, that technical description is, in reality, the only description which is clearly intelligible; but that technical language cannot be understood without being learnt as any other [391] language is learnt; that is, the reader must connect the terms immediately with his own sensations and notions, and not mediately, through a verbal explanation; he must not have to guess their meaning, or to discover it by a separate act of interpretation into more familiar language as often as they occur. The language of botany must be the botanist’s most familiar tongue. When the student has thus learnt to think in botanical language, it is no idle distinction to tell him that a bunch of grapes is not a cluster; that is, a thyrsus not a raceme. And the terminology of botany is then felt to be a useful implement, not an oppressive burden. It is only the schoolboy that complains of the irksomeness of his grammar and vocabulary. The accomplished student possesses them without effort or inconvenience.
As to the other question, whether the construction of such a botanical grammar and vocabulary implies an extensive and accurate acquaintance with the facts of nature, no one can doubt who is familiar with any descriptive science. It is true, that a person might construct an arbitrary scheme of distinctions and appellations, with no attention to natural objects; and this is what shallow and self-confident persons often set about doing, in some branch of knowledge with which they are imperfectly acquainted. But the slightest attempt to use such a phraseology leads to confusion; and any continued use of it leads to its demolition. Like a garment which does not fit us, if we attempt to work in it we tear it in pieces.
The formation of a good descriptive language is, in fact, an inductive process of the same kind as those which we have already noticed in the progress of natural history. It requires the discovery of fixed characters, which discovery is to be marked and fixed, like other inductive steps, by appropriate technical terms. The characters must be so far fixed, that the things which they connect must have a more permanent and real association than the things which they leave unconnected. If one bunch of grapes were really a racemus, and another a thyrsus, according to the definition of these terms, this part of the Linnæan language would lose its value; because it would no longer enable us to assert a general proposition with respect to one kind of plants.