10 Biographical Memoir of Michel Jdanson. 



devote himself entirely to another, on the Families of Plants, 

 which he had printed in 1763. He also here found the advan- 

 tage of operating upon more numerous beings, of examining 

 them in more points of view, and for which the empirical method 

 is more excusable, because the functions of their organs are more 

 obscure. 



Many botanists had already perceived the importance of dis- 

 tributing plants according to their natural relations. In the 

 latter end of the seventeenth century, Morison, Magnol, and 

 Ray, had, almost at the same time, conceived the idea of such a 

 distribution, but without devising very proper means for ac- 

 complishing it. Haller, long had this object in view, but had 

 not the good fortune to be able to make the natural relations 

 entirely agree with an absolute system ; and, notwithstanding 

 all his care, that which he adopted still broke through some of 

 those relations. Linnaeus voluntarily renounced it in forming 

 his System, and was only sometimes led to it by the force of 

 analogy, which constrained him to break loose from the rules 

 which he had prescribed to himself. 



In a word, of all the botanists that preceded M. Adanson, 

 the only one who had never abandoned the inquiry, and who 

 had been most successful in his investigations, and who even de- 

 served to be considered, in this respect, as the master of his con- 

 temporaries and successors, was Bernard de Jussieu. That ex- 

 traordinary man, who combined virtues and a modesty worthy 

 of the first ages, with an extent of knowledge which scarcely any 

 age has surpassed, was occupied with it during the whole of his 

 life ; but, always dissatisfied with what he had done, because he 

 saw better than any one what remained for him to do, he did 

 not commit his results to writing ; and they were only known by 

 the arrangement which he introduced in 1758, in the garden of 

 Trianon, and by the fragments which his friends or his disciples 

 published. There are strong reasons for thinking that Linnaeus 

 had profited by the conversation of Bernard de Jussieu on this 

 subject ; for several of the associations indicated in his Ordines 

 Naturales, published in 1753, under the form of a mere list 

 without explanations, would with difficulty have arisen from the 

 views which directed that celebrated naturalist in his other 

 works. 2 



