ON A. LAURENT DE JUSSIEU. 71 



admirable, that they alone would have sufficed to found the 

 reputation of any other man. Tliese fragments form a series 

 of Memoirs, inserted between the years 1804 to 1820, and 

 with little interruption, in the Annales du Museum. iNIore 

 than one half of the hundred primitive families of our author 

 are there revised, each being examined in detail, and every 

 one of the genera composing it. In 1789, ]M. de Jussieu 

 had not had it in his power to avail himself of Ga?rtner's 

 great work on Fruits, but he afterwards takes it as a basis for 

 comparisons, — the touchstone which should try all the new' 

 affinities that he attempts. When studying the struc- 

 ture of the seed, Gsertner had directed his anatomical 

 investigation to that very organ on which M. de Jussieu 

 founds his Method, and when applied to the science of affi- 

 nities, the observations of Gsertner assume a new and unex- 

 pected importance, of which M. de Jussieu makes use to cast 

 a fresh light on the calculation of characters, the formation of 

 families, and the art (till then so little known in Botany), of 

 applying to each other these two considerations, that oi 

 Anatomy and Method, on which, for all time to come, the 

 whole progress of science must depend. 



M. de Jussieu's relaxation from these trying labours con- 

 sisted in writings of another kind, but of which Natural 

 History, and of course the Jardin des Plantes^ formed the 

 subject — I mean the Memoires du Museum. 



The JRoyal Garden, founded during the reign of Louis 

 XIII., by an edict of 1626, was at first merely a garden for 

 medicinal plants; that was its correct name; and its cabinet 

 contained solely an assortment of drugs. M. de Jussieu 

 details the trifling beginninfrs of this collection, destined since 

 to become the most magnificent natural establishment extant; 

 he records the difficulties of all kinds that were to be sur- 

 mounted, and the petty war waged against it by the Faculty 

 of dfedicine, which peculiarly opposed the instruction in 

 Chemistry, (the object of one of the new chairs in the ]\Iu- 

 seum), " because," the Faculty alleged, " Chemistry ought 

 not to be propagated in Paris, seeing that it had been for 



