382 HISTORY OF BOTANY. 



at Basil in 1623. It was a useful undertaking at the time; but tlu 

 want of any genuine order in the Pinax itself, rendered it impossible 

 that it should be of great permanent utility. 



After this period, the progress of almost all the sciences became 

 languid for a while ; and one reason of this interruption was, the wars 

 and troubles which prevailed over almost the whole of Europe. The 

 quarrels of Charles the First and his parliament, the civil wars and the 

 usurpation, in England ; in France, the war of the League, the stormy 

 reign of Henry the Fourth, the civil wars of the minority of Louis the 

 Thirteenth, the war against the Protestants and the war of the Fronde 

 in the minority of Louis the Fourteenth ; the bloody and destructive 

 Thirty Years' War in Germany ; the war of Spain with the United 

 Provinces and with Portugal ; all these dire agitations left men neithei 

 leisure nor disposition to direct their best thoughts to the promotion of 

 science. The baser spirits were brutalized ; the better were occupied 

 by high practical aims and struggles of their moral nature. Amid 

 such storms, the intellectual powers of man could not work with their 

 due calmness, nor his intellectual objects shine with their proper lustre. 



At length a period of greater tranquillity gleamed forth, and the 

 sciences soon expanded in the sunshine. Botany was not inert amid 

 this activity, and rapidly advanced in a new direction, that of physio- 

 logy ; but before we speak of this portion of our subject, we must com- 

 plete what we have to say of it as a classificatory science. 



Sect. 4. Sequel to the Epoch of Gcesalpinus. Further Formai'ton 

 and Adoption of Systematic Arrangement. 



SOON after the period of which we now speak, that of the restoration 

 of the Stuarts to the throne of England, systematic arrangements 

 of plants appeared in great numbers ; and in a manner such as to 

 show that the minds of botanists had gradually been ripening for this 

 improvement, through the influence of preceding writers, and the grow- 

 ing acquaintance with plants. The person whose name is usually 

 placed first on this list, Robert Morison, appears to me to be much less 

 meritorious than many of those who published very shortly after him; 

 but I will give him the precedence in my narrative He was a Scotch- 

 man, who was wounded fio'liting on the rovalist side in the civil wars 



o o * 



of England. On the triumph of the republicans, he withdrew to 

 France, when he became director of the g'arden of Gaston, Duke of 

 Orleans at Blois; and there he came under the notice of our Charles 



