338 MR. G. BENTHAM ON COMPOSITE. 
under the Jussieuan name of Composite, and his three families as 
so many suborders, to which Lagasca and De Candolle added a 
fourth under the name of Labiatiflore. Of these suborders the 
Cichoriacee, with the corollas all ligulate, have ever since maintained 
their ground as the most natural as well as the most accurately 
defined group in the whole order; the three others have been very 
variously modified or subdivided into tribes, none of which can as 
yet be considered as separated by any absolute characters. 
Henri Cassini was the first who undertook a general revision 
and redistribution of Composite. Leaving the Cichoriacee un- 
disturbed as a distinct tribe (changing the name, however, to 
Lactucee), he rearranged the great mass of tubuliflorous Composite 
upon new principles. His long series of articles, some of them 
first sketched out in the ‘ Bulletin des Sciences de la Société Phi- 
lomathique,’ were distributed over the sixty volumes of the ‘ Dic- 
tionnaire des Sciences Naturelles; some of the more general ones 
collected in his ‘Opuscules Botaniques; the whole published 
between the years 1816 and 1834. These papers include a large 
number of very valuable observations, the result of the study of 
as many species as he could obtain in a living state, or could 
examine in the herbaria of Jussieu and others. He was the first 
to make use of the modifications of the style and anthers in the 
general systematic arrangement of the order; and he clearly 
exhibited the funetions of the collecting, or, as he not inaptly 
terms them, sweeping hairs and papille (poils collecteurs, poils ba- 
layeurs, papilles balayeuses of Cassini, Fegehaare of Hildebrand). 
His table, or, rather, map, ofthe tribes (plate 1 of the * Opuscules ") 
shows a just appreciation of the natural affinities of the order, and of 
the principal groups of which it is composed, and in some respects, 
as in the tribe of Inulee, gives a better arrangement than 
those of Lessing and De Candolle. Unfortunately, however, in 
working out the details of the genera in the ‘ Dictionnaire,’ he 
indulged in an enormous and useless multiplication of generic 
names, which only tended to throw the nomenclature into confusion, 
and cast a slur upon all his labours. Wherever he observed a 
slight difference in the involucre, pappus, or general aspect, or 
could not readily identify an imperfect specimen, an engraved 
figure, or a description often incorrect, he at once set it down as 
a new genus, and has thus, more than any other botanist of equal 
ability overloaded the science with useless synonyms. So recklessly, 
indeed, did he give way to this mania of coining new names, that 
