ox A. LAURENT DR JUSSIEU. 63 



to fifty-eiglit; and yet, his two Essays contain nothing but 

 a series of names; no explanation, development or indi- 

 cation of the motives which can have guided the author, 

 whether in the formation or classification of these families. 

 " This was," in the words of Jussien, " a sort of problem, 

 which Linnaeus left to his successors to solve," — and which has 

 never been solved. A work by Adanson, published in 1763, 

 is far more complete, and when viewed as regarding natural 

 families, of much greater importance than that by Linneeus. 

 The most striking feature in Adanson is his turn for reform, 

 a peculiarity which may be seen in his very earliest produc- 

 tion, the Natural History of Senegal, where, in the classi- 

 fication of the Shells, he completely changes the generally 

 adopted mode of arrangement, placing it on its only true 

 basis, namely, the structure of the animals, of which the shells 

 are, in fact, solely the coverings. Equally does this original 

 and renovating genius appear in the same author's book, on 

 the Families of Plants. No man has striven harder than 

 Adanson to liberate science from the trammels of system, 

 and to brinfT to light the radical defect that attaches to all 

 Artificial, that is, partial systems, deriving their character, as 

 they do, from a single part or organ, and that part selected 

 arbitrarily ; — no one ever perceived more distinctly, that 

 Method, if it would coincide with Nature, must rest on the 

 universality of the parts ; but what Adanson did not see is, 

 that some parts are subordinate to others. And as a proof 

 of how far prejudice may go, even in a mind of this descrip- 

 tion, is the following curious phrase, which I find in Adan- 

 son's Report to the Academy on M. de Jussieu's First Me- 

 moir, where he says, " the principles adopted by M. de 

 Jussieu, will perhaps find a somewhat difficult reception 

 among those botanists who think with me, that a method, to 

 be natural, must be founded on all the parts viewed as a 

 whole, without bestowing an exclusive preference on any one 

 above all the rest." Here the mistake of Adanson is evident 

 to every reader ; what he rejects under the appellation of 

 '^ exclusive preference,''^ is exactly the subordination of 



