78 Artificial Systems and Terminology of Organs [BOOK 



i. 



Tournefort's system is thoroughly artificial, if possible, more 

 artificial than that of Bachmann, and certainly inferior to Ray's. 

 If we meet with single groups that are really natural, it is simply 

 because in some families the genera so agree together in all 

 their marks, that they necessarily remain united, whatever mark 

 we select for the systematic purpose. We do not find in Tour- 

 nefort the distinction between Phanerogams and Cryptogams 

 already established by Ray, nor the division of woody plants 

 and herbs into Monocotyledons and Dicotyledons ; if his chief 

 work, to which we confine ourselves here, the ' Institutiones rei 

 herbariae,' did not bear the date of 1700, we might conclude 

 that it was written before the ' Historia Plantarum ' of Ray, and 

 the chief work of Bachmann. Yet it has one merit of a purely 

 formal kind ; it is pervaded by a rigorous spirit of system ; 

 every class is divided into sections, these into genera, and these 

 again into species ; figures of the leaves and of the parts of the 

 flower, very beautifully engraved on copper-plate and filling a 

 whole volume, are perspicuously arranged ; the whole work 

 therefore is easy to consult and understand. But to form an 

 idea of the confusion as regards natural affinities that reigns in 

 his system, we need only examine the first three sections of his 

 first class, when we shall find Atropa and Mandragora together 

 in the first section, Polygonatum and Ruscus in the second, 

 Cerinthe, Gentiana, Soldanella, Euphorbia, and Oxalis in 

 the third. The handiness of the book, the little interest taken 

 by most of the botanists of the time in the question of natural 

 relationship, and the continually increasing eagerness for a 

 knowledge of individual plants, are evidently the reasons why 

 Tournefort gained over to his side most of the botanists not 

 only of France, but also of England, Italy, and Germany ; and 

 why later attempts in systematic botany during the first thirty 

 or forty years of the i8th century were almost exclusively 

 founded on his system, as they were afterwards on the sexual 

 system of Linnaeus. Boerhaave, among others, proposed a 

 system in 1710, which may be regarded as a combination of 



