SKETCH OF MATTHIAS JACOB SCHLEIDEN. 259 



ical treatise for students and a popular book for readers. Schleiden 

 composed both. The time had passed when the study of living beings 

 should form a separate branch of science, and when those who dis- 

 carded the dry enumerations of the classifiers would have to fall into 

 the ideal reveries of the " philosophers of nature." It needed to be 

 shown that botany was not the mere dry skeleton which the former 

 would make of it, and that it did not require the tinsel with which the 

 latter assumed to adorn it. In the " Grundziige der wissenschaf tlichen 

 Botanik" ("Elements of Scientific Botany") of Schleiden, the science 

 was for the first time treated entirely according to the inductive 

 method, as physics and chemistry had already been considered ; and 

 the different branches of science, till very recently still isolated and 

 almost hostile, were made to interpenetrate and mutually illustrate 

 each other. The book was well adapted to enlarge the scientific hori- 

 zon, and to inspire youth and develop the spirit of research in them. 

 The reading of the first few pages of the book is sufficient to give this 

 impression of its motive. The dedication to Alexander von Hum- 

 boldt, unquestionably the man of most universal knowledge of his time, 

 attests the author's desire to connect botany intimately with the other 

 sciences. The capital importance which he rightly attached to method 

 is affirmed by the title which he gave to the second edition of his trea- 

 tise " Botany as an Inductive Science." The very first lines of his 

 preface show that he does not intend to deal with a science of words 

 and dreams, but of observation, experiment, and independent thought. 

 " Whoever thinks he can learn botany in this book may as well put it 

 aside at once without reading it, for botany can not be learned from 

 books." In this work, says Dr. Karl Midler, Schleiden expressed for 

 the first time a full comprehension that natural science was essentially 

 a history of development, and expressed it in such a manner as to at- 

 tract enthusiastic youth to his doctrine while he incurred the hostility 

 of the elders in science. Among the salient features of his theory are 

 the ascription of a leading part in all morphological questions to the 

 study of the development of the organs, and his putting of the crypto- 

 gams upon a footing of equality in consideration with phanerogams. 

 Perhaps no innovation in science has been so fruitful as the step which 

 gave the prominent place in study to the first, stages rather than to 

 adult forms, to inferior beings rather than to elevated and complex 

 groups. 



One passage in the " Grundziige " is worthy of especial remark, for 

 the evidence it bears of the completeness of the author's rejection of 

 the sterile categories of the older philosophers, and of his having been 

 endowed with the scientific spirit of later times. " The division of 

 natural objects into organic and inorganic could only have originated 

 at a time when students had only the two extremes to consider. A 

 person comparing a lion with a piece of chalk would, doubtless, say 

 that the difference is evident to all the senses. But let him compare 



