Scientific Reviews. 181 



" Professor." We had perhaps erroneously imagined that all titles 

 or dignities flow from the crown either directly or indirectly, and 

 that universities hold their power only by royal charter to grant 

 degrees of A.M., M.D, &c.; and till now we never supposed that 

 an unchartered seminary of education in London or elsewhere, 

 could confer any of these degrees ; or could assume a still higher 

 prerogative, and give the titles of " Professor" to the gentlemen who 

 there give lectures on the various branches of literature and science. 

 We know that, by the rules of the English language, any one who 

 professes a subject, whether he belongs to a collegiate body or not, 

 may assume the name of " Professor ;" but, then, if Mr. Lindley 

 be a " Professor" of Botany, so is Mr. Frost, so is any member of 

 the Med. Bot. Society, et hoc genus omne; and the usual practice 

 is against such assumptions. 



Let us now look at the preface. ]Mr. Lindley here explains the 

 nature of the arrangement he intends to follow. Speaking of the 

 previous works on the Flora of Great Britain, he says, " These 

 have all, with the exception of the Flora Scotica of Dr. Hooker, 

 been arranged upon the principles of a system, which, whatever 

 popularity it may, from particular circumstances, have acquired, 

 and however useful it may have been found in communicating a 

 knowledge of the names of things, does certainly not now tend to 

 the advancement of science, or to an accurate knowledge of things 

 themselves." And it is to obviate this defect that the " Synopsis" 

 was offered. Now we do not agree that his own is the ^first work 

 on the Flora of Great Britain that has followed the natural arrange- 

 went. Mr. Lindley knows well that Mr. Gray or JNIr. Salisbury, 

 or both under Mr. Gray's name, did, in 1821, publish a " Natural 

 Arrangement of British Plants ;" and however detestable that 

 work be, still there are some things in it, which even De Candolle 

 has thought right to copy, and which Mr. Lindley again has copied 

 and quoted (let hitn explain this want of candour,) from De Can- 

 dolle without any allusion to Gray. Mr. Lindley's work is, how- 

 ever, entitled to the merit of presenting this system, as far as re- 

 gards Britain, in a portable form. 



- Upon carefully perusing this work, it appears to us that it is ra- 

 ther a compilation, about which Mr. Lindley had given himself no 

 trouble, than as an effort of that genius, which any one who looks 

 at his other publications knows he possesses in a great degree. In 

 his haste to adopt new genera, or, as he himself says in his preface, 

 " to render the nomenclature of genera and species conformable to 

 that of continental writers of the highest authority," he has not 

 taken time to scrutinize the plants themselves, but, trusting to the 

 " continental writers," who are as frequently in error as the Bri- 

 tish authors, has sometimes put species into genera with the cha- 

 racters of which they do not agree, and in which no analytical stu- 

 dent would search for them. 



- With this Avork, however, in so far as it contains, at a cheap rate, 

 the characters of the natural orders, (we Avish another sheet or 



