But during the last century men have arisen, who were dissatisfied with a term that covered everything and meant nothing, and who were determined to find out what constituted progress and whether it had any existence in the world of reality. More has been accomplished in this respect during that century than in all the combined previous existence of the human race. The conception or idea of progress is the mental reflection of the process of evolution, which operates everywhere to the remotest niche or cranny in the material universe. The only difference between progress and evolution is that evolution is a more inclusive term, including as it does phenomena which we should call retrogressive.
The men who laid the foundations of modern knowledge, and imparted sense and force to hitherto meaningless terms, were they who threw aside theological phantasms and metaphysical speculations and set themselves the task of gathering the facts and ascertaining the laws of the real--the material--world. This is the method of science, and it is to this method that we owe all our knowledge of world problems.
For more than a thousand years this method was practically suspended. Any attempt, during that period, to make use of it was rigorously suppressed, except among the pagan Arabians. Biological science stood still, scarcely even marking time. Says Packard “After Aristotle, no epoch-making zoologist arose until Linnaeus was born,” a yawning chasm of thirteen hundred years.
Linnaeus, born 1707, in Sweden, was the greatest naturalist of his time and might have done greater things for evolutionary ideas had it not been for the theological influences which restrained him. But, hindered as he was, he accomplished enough to entitle him to a place among the immortals. “He found botany a chaos,” says Prof. Thatcher, “and left it a unity.” His contribution to science consists mainly in his system of classification and nomenclature. Before Linnaeus nobody had been able, though many had tried, to group and name animal and vegetable forms in such a manner as to rescue them from utter confusion. This is precisely what Linnaeus did when, by a happy idea, he adopted what is called the “binary nomenclature.”