42 ROBERT MORISON AND JOHN RAY 



" Exogenae " for " Dicotyledones" , The system has proved itself 

 capable of expansion to accommodate all the new genera and 

 natural orders that have since been established : it has justified 

 itself as a natural classification in its susceptibility to develop- 

 ment in precision as well as in extent, and in that it has survived 

 the many experiments made upon it during the first century of 

 its existence. 



The glory of this crowning achievement belongs to Jussieu : 

 he was the capable man who appeared precisely at the psycho- 

 logical moment, and it is the men that so appear who have 

 made, and will continue to make, all the great generalisations 

 of science. Jussieu's achievement, like other great scientific 

 achievements, would have been impossible without the labours 

 and failures of his predecessors, of which some account has been 

 given in this lecture. He himself attributed much of his success 

 to the work of Tournefort, but it is clear that he owed at least 

 as much to Ray : if he learned from the former the systematic 

 importance of the gamopetalous and of the polypetalous corolla) 

 he gleaned from the latter the value of the cotyledonary charac- 

 ters upon which are based his three primary subdivisions of the 

 Vegetable Kingdom. 



It has been necessary to go beyond the strict limits of the 

 history of British Botany in order to make it clear to what 

 extent and at what period our two distinguished fellow-country- 

 men contributed to the development of the natural system of 

 classification. Enough has been said to establish the importance 

 and the opportuneness of their contributions: if Pisa was glorified 

 by the birth of Systematic Botany, and Paris by its adolescence, 

 Oxford and Cambridge were honoured by its renascence. The 

 question concerning the respective merits of Morison and Ray 

 finds perhaps its most satisfactory answer in the words of 

 Linnaeus (Classes Plantarum, 1747, p. 65): " Quamprimum 

 Morisonus artis fundamentum restaurasset, eidem mox stiam 

 superstruxit methodum Rajus, quam dein toties reparavit, usque 

 dum in ultima senectute emendatam et auctam emitteret" \ Morison 

 relaid the foundation upon which Ray built. As Linnaeus points 

 out, Ray enjoyed the advantage of a very long period of pro- 

 ductive activity : in the thirty-four years that separated his 



