EVOLUTION OF NATURAL SYSTEM 41 



Natural Orders of similar designation. A remarkable, if not 

 altogether successful, attempt in the same direction was Adan- 

 son's Families des Plantes (1763), based upon the sound Linnean 

 principle, " qu'il ne peut i avoir de Methode naturele en Botanicke, 

 que celle qui considere V ensemble de toutes les parties des Plantes" 

 The number of species and varieties known in his day amounted 

 to something over eighteen thousand: these, reduced into 1615 

 genera, he grouped into fifty-eight families. Several of those 

 had been already more or less well defined ; but most of them 

 were entirely original, and not a few of them persist to the 

 present day, though Adanson is not credited with all that are 

 his due. His lack of method in naming his families, to say 

 nothing of the fantastic nomenclature of his genera, made it 

 necessary for other names to be preferred to his. Still some 

 familiar names of natural orders are attributable to him, such 

 as Hepaticae, Onagrae, Compositae, Caprifolia, Borragines, Por- 

 tulacae, Amaranthi, Papavera, Cisti, though most of them have 

 since undergone some change in their termination. In addition 

 to these, there are several which would have been credited to 

 Adanson, had it not so happened that they had also been 

 suggested by Bernard de Jussieu : such are, Palmae, Aristo- 

 lochiae, Myrti, Campanulae, Apocyna, Verbenae, Thymeleae, Ge- 

 rania, Malvae, Ranunculi. Adanson was the first to publish 

 these names (1763): but Bernard de Jussieu had made use of 

 them as early as 1759 in laying out the Trianon Garden at 

 Versailles, though they were not actually published until 1789, 

 when all the 65 orders devised by him were included in the 

 Genera Plantar um secundum Or dines Naturales disposita of his 

 famous nephew Antoine Laurent de Jussieu. Here at last was 

 a fairly complete natural system, consisting of one hundred 

 natural orders arranged in fifteen classes, within the three great 

 subdivisions, Acotyledones, Monocotyledones, Dicotyledones, con- 

 stituting the framework of that which is accepted at the present 

 day. It has undergone many modifications, of which the first 

 and most important were those effected by A. P. de Candolle 



x 



(Theorie Element air e, 1813), who, while he improved upon Jussieu 

 in various ways, made the unfortunate, but happily unsuccessful, 

 attempt to substitute " Endogenae" for " Monocotyledones " and 



