390 HISTOEY OF BOTANY. 



Q 



conviction had never been acted upon so as to produce a distinct and 

 adequate descriptive botanical language. Jung, indeed, 8 had already 

 attempted to give rules and precepts which should answer this purpose ; 

 but it was not till the Fundamenta Botanica appeared, that the science 

 could be said to possess a fixed and complete terminology. 



To give an account of such a terminology, is, in fact, to give ?. 

 description of a dictionary and grammar, and is therefore what cannot 

 here be done in detail. Linnseus's work contains about a thousand 

 terms of which the meaning and application are distinctly explained ; 

 and rules are given, by which, in the use of such terms, the botanist 

 may avoid all obscurity, ambiguity, unnecessary prolixity and com- 

 plexity, and even inelegance and barbarism. Of course the greater 

 part of the words which Linnaeus thus recognized had previously 

 existed in botanical writers ; and many of them had been defined with 

 technical precision. Thus Jung 4 had already explained what was a 

 composite, what a, ftinnate leaf; what kind of a bunch of flowers is a 

 spike, a panicle, an umbel, a corymb, respectively. Linnseus extended 

 such distinctions, retaining complete clearness in their separation. 

 Thus, with him, composite leaves are further distinguished as digitate, 

 pinnate, bipinnate, pcdate, .and so on ; pinnate leaves are abruptly so, 

 or with an odd one, or with a tendril ; they are pinnate oppositely, 

 alternately, interruptedly, articulately, decursively. Again, the inflo 

 rescence, as the mode of assemblage of the flowers is called, may be a 

 tuft (fasciculus), a head (capitulnm), a cluster (racemus), a bunch 

 (thyrsus), a 'panicle, a spike, a catkin (amentum), a corymb, an umbel, 

 a cyme, a whorl (verticillus). And the rules which he gives, though 

 often apparently arbitrary and needless, are found, in practice, to be of 

 great service by their fixity and connexion. By the good fortune of 

 having had a teacher with so much delicacy of taste as Linnaeus, in a 

 situation of so much influence, Botany possesses a descriptive language 

 which will long stand as a model for all other subjects. 



It may, perhaps, appear to some persons, that such a terminology as 

 we have here described must be enormously cumbrous ; and that, 

 since the terms are arbitrarily invested with their meaning, the inven- 

 tion of them requires no knowledge of nature. With respect to the 

 former doubt, we may observe, that technical description is, in reality, 

 the only description which is clearly intelligible ; but that technical 

 anguage cannot be understood without being learnt as any other Ian- 



I&agoge Phytoscopica, 1679. 4 Sprenajel, ii. 28. 



