1:02 HISTORY OF BOTANY. 



criticism and his influence, they armed themselves with dislike and 

 contempt. 



In England the Linnscan system was very favorably received : 

 perhaps the more favorably, for being a strictly artificial system. For 

 the indefinite and unfinished form which almost inevitably clings to a 

 natural method, appears to be peculiarly distasteful to our countrymen. 

 It might seem as if the suspense and craving which comes with know- 

 ledge confessedly incomplete were so disagreeable to them, that they 

 were willing to avoid it, at any rate whatever ; either by rejecting sys- 

 tem altogether, or by accepting a dogmatical system without reserve. 

 The former has been their course in recent times with regard to 

 Mineralogy ; the latter was their proceeding with respect to the 

 Linnaean Botany. It is in this country alone, I believe, that Werne- 

 rian and Linncean Societies have been instituted. Such appellations 

 somewhat remind us of the Aristotelian and Platonic schools of ancient 

 Greece. In the same spirit it was, that the Artificial System was at 

 one time here considered, not as subsidiary and preparatory to the 

 Natural Orders, but as opposed to them. This was much as if the 

 disposition of an army in a review should be considered as inconsistent 

 with another arrangement of it in a battle. 



When Linnseus visited England in 1736, Sloane, then the patron of 

 natural history in this country, is said to have given him a cool recep- 

 tion, such as was perhaps most natural from an old man to a young 

 innovator ; and Dillenius, the Professor at Oxford, did not accept the 

 sexual system. But as Pulteney, the historian of English Botany, says, 

 when his works became known, " the simplicity of the classical charac- 

 ters, the uniformity of the generic notes, all confined to the parts of 

 the fructification, and the precision which marked the specific distinc- 

 tions, merits so new, soon commanded the assent of the unprejudiced." 



Perhaps the progress of the introduction of the Linnsean System 

 into England will be best understood from the statement of T. Martyn, 

 who was Professor of Botany in the University of Cambridge, from 

 1761 to 1825. "About the year 1750," he says, 22 "I was a pupil of 

 the school of our great countryman Ray; but the rich vein of know- 

 ledge, the profoundness and precision, which I remarked everywhere 

 in the Philosophic/, Botanica, (published in 1751,) withdrew me from 

 my first master, and I became a decided convert to that system of 

 botany which has since been generally received. In 1753, the Species 



Pref. to Language of Botany, 3rd edit. 1807. 



