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127 



good botanists of earlier times, which blemish the pages of the 

 most useful of our bookstand misinstruct the unwary student re- 

 garding who, in generations past, have been blind to generic 

 characters and who have not. 



And now to come down to the real matter of Linnaeus' skill, 

 or want of it, in setting limits to genera. We have been under- 

 stood as saying that he did not always approve himself a skilful 

 workman in that special hne of botanical labor. That is what we 

 meant to be saying, precisely. Nor did we suppose that any 

 man well versed in the history of genera could question it. 



I am not making myself the judge of Linn^us in this particu- 

 lar; but the opinion which I may have been the last to voice was 

 pronounced quite unanimously, in fact if not in word explicit, by 

 two successive generations of botanists who were dead before I 

 was born. What was the general task which claimed the time 

 and energies of men like Adanson, Moench, La Marck, Joseph 

 Gaertner, Robert Brown, Haworth, Salisbury, the elder De Can- 

 dolle, and other worthies of the first post-Linnaean epoch ? That 

 of bringing order out of the Linnaean confusion of genera. They 

 had both to restore old genera of Tournefort, Plumier, Dillen and 

 many more which Linnaeus had demolished, because he had not 

 eyes to see that they had been rightly founded ; and they had to 

 propose new genera upon plants which, as new, had fallen into 

 Linnaeus' hands, and so failed to obtain at first correct generical 

 determination. 



A few illustrations out of the many pages of them which 

 could easily be adduced, will suffice. 



Bentham and Hooker and their Ranunculaceae, already cited 

 on a point leading up to this, may here directly serve us. Take 

 Helleboms. It was adopted by Linnaeus as a generic name ; but 

 with him it embraced the three genera, Helleborns, Coptis and Eran- 

 ihis. Not ignoring here what was adverted to in a previous 

 paper, that is to say the Linnaean NympJma, compounded of true 

 4 Nymphoea and two other genera, we may pass, for brevity's sake, to 



tile Fumariaceae, where a whole order, as known at that time, con- 

 sisting of species of Fumaria, Corydalis, Dicentra, Sarcocapnos 

 and Cysticapnos were jumbled together by him under the old 

 generic name Fzunarla, The Linnaean genus Rudbeckia was 



