16 Martius on the Life and Labours of DeCandolle, 



the whole sum of botanical knowledge, dates no further back, in 

 a systematic form, than the sixteenth century. In 1584 Conrad 

 Gessner published the first methodized work upon the vegetable 

 kingdom. In 1623 Caspar Bauhin produced the first systematic 

 register (' Pinax^), in which about seven thousand species of plants 

 were indicated by names and some description, but without cha- 

 racteristics. Tournefort published the first work which can be 

 properly called a systematic arrangement, in the years 1694 and 

 1700. His work contains 9516 articles, or about 8000 species 

 of plants ; and this number was not materially increased in the 

 next succeeding general work, the ^ Historia Plantarum^ of Ray, 

 in the years 1693 to 1704. In 1737 Linnaeus gave his first sy- 

 stematic description of known plants. As Tom'nefort had intro- 

 duced the conception of genera into science, that of species was 

 now established, along with a method of description based on a 

 well-founded and enlarged terminology. But Linnaeus, in throw- 

 ing overboard a vast number of old and unintelligible accounts of 

 plants as useless ballast, at once reduced the list of species to about 

 7000, a number which in the later editions of his ^ Systema' may 

 have been increased to about 12,000. Since that time the increase 

 of acknowledged species has been truly prodigious. In the last 

 of the works of Linnaeus, in the year 1760, we find in the first five 

 classes of his sexual system 1835 species of plants ; Vitman in 

 1790 has 3491 ; WiUdenow in 1797, 4831 ; Persoon in 1806, 

 6121 ; Romer and Schultes from 1817 to 1823, 13,519 species. 

 In the first edition of SteudePs ^ Nomenclator Botanicus,^ the first 

 complete 'Pinax^ since Bauhin, the number of genera of Phaenoga- 

 mous plants, or of the first twenty-three classes of the Linnaean 

 system, amounts to 3376, and that of species to 39,684 : the se- 

 cond edition of this celebrated work, on the other hand, which 

 was finished in the current year 1841, reckons of Phaenogamous 

 plants, 6722 genera and 78,005 species. 



DeCandoUe's task was therefore six times greater than that of 

 Linnaeus, if we only take simple numbers into consideration. But 

 to this must be added the numerous difficulties which arise from 

 the dispersion of materials throughout a literature in which the 

 botanists of all civilized countries take part. Besides, in the time 

 of Linnaeus, science had much fewer foci than at present. Learned 

 societies have now been formed in North and South America, in 

 India and Java, for the promotion of the natural sciences, and 

 separate portions of systematic botany are treated in periodical 

 publications, monographies, and gi-eater or smaller works, written, 

 not in Latin exclusively, as was formerly the case, but often in 

 the language of the country. Hence the acquisition of the requi- 

 site literary apparatus merely is now within the reach of only 

 very considerable pecuniary means. DeCandolle, with the most 



