398 HISTOKY OF BOTANY. 



of small importance in another part; 15 - the Character does not con 

 stitute the Genus, but the Genus the Character; the Character i? 

 necessary, not to make the Genus, but to recognize it. The vague- 

 ness of these maxims is easily seen ; the rule of attending to all the 

 parts, implies, that we are to estimate their relative importance, either 

 by physiological considerations (and these again lead to arbitrary 

 rules, as, for instance, the superiority of the function of nutrition to 

 that of reproduction), or by a sort of latent naturalist instinct, which 

 Linnaeus in some passages seems to recognize. " The Habit of a 

 plant," he says, 16 " must be secretly consulted. A practised botanist 

 will distinguish, at the first glance, the plants of different quarters of 

 the globe, and yet will be at a loss to tell by what mark he detects 

 them. There is, I know not what look, sinister, dry, obscure in 

 African plants ; superb and elevated, in the Asiatic ; smooth and 

 cheerful, in the American ; stunted and indurated, in the Alpine." 



Again, the rule that the same parts are of very different value in 

 different Orders, not only leaves us in want of rules or reasons which 

 may enable us to compare the marks of different Orders, but destroys 

 the systematic completeness of the natural arrangement. If some of 

 the Orders be regulated by the flower and others by the fruit, we may 

 have plants, of which the flower would place them in one Order, and 

 the fruit in another. The answer to this difficulty is the maxim 

 already stated ; that no Character makes the Order ; and that if a 

 Character do not enable us to recognize the Order, it does not answer 

 its purpose, and ought to be changed for another. 



This doctrine, that the Character is to be employed as a servant 

 and not as a master, was a stumbling-block in the way of those 

 disciples who looked only for dogmatical and universal rules. One 

 of Linnaeus's pupils, Paul Dietrich Giseke, has given us a very lively 

 account of his own perplexity on having this view propounded to 

 him, and of the way in which he struggled with it. He had com- 

 plained of the want of intelligible grounds, in the collection of natural 

 orders given by Linnseus. Linnaeus 17 wrote in answer, " You ask me 

 for the characters of the Natural Orders : I confess I cannot give 

 them." ' Such a reply naturally increased Giseke's difficulties. But 

 afterwards, in 1771, he had the good fortune to spend some time at 

 Upsal ; and he narrates a conversation which he held with the great 



15 Phil. Bot. p. 172. 16 Ib. p. 171. 



17 Linncei Prcelectiones, Pref. p. xv. 



