278 NATURAL MODE OP CLASSIFICATION. 



important and interesting branch, or rather the funda- 

 mental part, of systematical botany. Without them the 

 science is truly a study of words, contributing nothing to 

 enlarge, little worthy to exercise, a rational mind. Lin- 

 naeus therefore suggests a scheme which he modestly 

 calls Fragments of a Natural Method, which formed 

 the subject of his occasional contemplation ; but he dai- 

 ly and hourly studied the principles of natural affinities 

 among plants, conscious that no true knowledge of their 

 distinctions, any more than of their qualities, could be 

 obtained without ; of which important truth he was not 

 only the earliest, but even the most strenuous assertor. 

 In the mean while, however, Linnaeus, well aware 

 that a natural classification was scarcely ever to be com- 

 pletely discovered, and that if discovered it would prob- 

 ablv be too difficult for common use, contrived an artiji- 

 cial system, by which plants might conveniently be ar- 

 ranged, like words in a dictionary, so as to be most 

 readily found. If all the words of a language could be 

 disposed according to their abstract derivations, or gram- 

 matical affinities, such a performance might be very in- 

 structive to a philosopher, but would prove of little ser- 

 vice to a young scholar ; nor has it ever been mentioned 

 as any objection to the use of a dictionary, that words of 

 very different meanings, if formed of nearly the same let- 

 ters, often stand together. The method of Linnaeus 

 therefore is just such a dictionary in Botany, while his 

 Philosophia Botanica is the grammar, and his other 

 works contain the history, and even the poetry, of the 

 cience. 



