CHAP, ii.] from Cesalpino to Linnaeus. 77 



he merely transferred the centre of gravity, so to speak, in 

 descriptive botany to the definition of the genera; but in doing 

 so he committed the great fault of treating specific differences 

 within the genus as a matter of secondary importance. How 

 little depth there was in his botanical ideas may be seen not 

 only from his very poor theory of the flower, the imperfections 

 in which, as in the case of Bachmann, are the more remarkable, 

 since he founded his system on the outward form of the flower, 

 but still more from the expression which he uses at the end of 

 his history of botany, a work otherwise of considerable merit ; 

 he says there that the science of botany has been so far 

 advanced since the age of Hippocrates, that hardly anything is 

 still wanting except an exact establishing of genera. His 

 general propositions on the subject of systematic botany, 

 together with much that is good, but which is generally not new 

 and is better expressed in the works of Morison, Ray, and 

 Bachmann, contain strange misconceptions ; for instance, he 

 classes plants which have no flower and fruit with those in 

 which these parts are to be seen only with the microscope, that 

 is, the smallness of the organs is equivalent to their absence. It 

 may seem strange that his theory of the flower should be so 

 imperfect, when the excellent investigations of Malpighi and 

 Grew into the structure of flowers, fruit, and seed were already 

 before the world (1700), and Rudolph Jacob Camerarius had 

 made known his discovery of sexuality in the vegetable king- 

 dom. This doctrine, however, Tournefort expressly refused to 

 admit. But the reproach of neglecting the labours of Malpighi 

 and Grew is equally applicable to Bachmann and the systematists 

 up to A. L. de Jussieu ; we have here only the first example of 

 the fact since so often confirmed, that professed systematists 

 shrank with a certain timidity from the results of more delicate 

 morphological research, and rested their classifications as far as 

 possible on obvious external features in plants, a proceeding 

 which more than anything else delayed the construction of the 

 natural system. 



