ON A. LAURENT DE JUSSIEU. 59 



menting rapidity, still accelerated as it approaches our own 

 times. 



To confine ourselves to Botany; the number of plants 

 which is estimated, by the early authors of the l6th century, 

 to be from eight to nine hundred, had been before the close 

 of that century, raised to two thousand; — yet a hundred years 

 farther on, — we find Tournefort reckoning them at ten thou- 

 sand, including varieties ; when reduced to the total of spe- 

 cies, properly so called, Linnaeus makes the amount 7000 ; 

 — 20,000 according to Jussieu ; and at the present day, even 

 this large number is quadrupled ! Nearly 80,000 plants will 

 be described in M. de CandoUe's great work, now in progress; 

 the Compositee only, are upwards of 8000; a single family 

 thus containing more individual species, than the whole vege- 

 table kingdom was estimated to comprise in the times of 

 Linnaeus ! 



The peculiarity which perhaps places the powers of M. de 

 Jussieu's mind in the strongest light, is the way in which he 

 made use of the materials that were then known to exist. As I 

 have just said, these materials have since been quadrupled, and 

 yet there is no great principle of the Natural Order which 

 does not find a place in his book, and hardly a single combi- 

 nation among those established by his successors, of wliich 

 the germ may not there be seen. Fontenelie admires in 

 Tournefort, a classification in which upwards of 1200 new 

 species, "which," he adds, ^"were unexpected," could be 

 placed without disturbing its foundation. What would he 

 have said of the Arrangement by M. de Jussieu, when nearly 

 50,000 species, unknown at the period when this author was 

 writing, might find their own stations, and almost always a 

 station indicated beforehand, a statioji which was expecting 

 them ? The work in which M. de Jussieu sets forth this 

 Method, the fruit of deeply calculated combinations, is the 

 result of fifteen years' unceasing labour. He sent it to the 

 press in 1788; his mind so imbued with it that its printing 

 began before the manuscript was complete, the author indeed 

 never being more than two or three leaves in advance of the 



