CLASSIFICATION. 235 



his system of arrangement should be entirely forgotten, 

 Not that he has excelled in verbal definitions, nor 

 built all his genera on sure foundations ; but his fig- 

 ures, and his enumerations of species under each genus, 

 show the clearness of his conceptions, and rank him as 

 the father of this branch of botany. 



Linnaeus first insisted on generic characters being 

 exclusively taken from the flowers and the fruit, and 

 he demonstrated these to be sufficient for all the plants 

 that can be discovered. He also laid it down as a 

 maxim, that all genera are as much founded in nature 

 as the species which compose them ; and hence fol- 

 lows one of the most just and valuable of all his princi- 

 ples, that a genus should furnish a character, not a char- 

 acter form a genus; or, in other words, that a certain 

 coincidence of structure, habit, and perhaps qualities, 

 among a number of plants, should strike the judgment 

 of a botanist, before he fixes on one or more technical 

 characters, by which to stamp and define such plants 

 as one natural genus. 



In methodical arrangement, whether natural or arti- 

 ficial, every thing must give way to generic distinc- 

 tions. A natural system which should separate the spe- 

 cies of a good genus, would, by that very test alone, 

 prove entirely worthless ; and if such a defect be some- 

 times unavoidable in an artificial one, contrivances must 

 be adopted to remedy it ; of which Linnaeus has set us 

 the example, as will hereafter be explained. 



Generic characters are reckoned by Linnaeus of three 

 kind, the factitious, the essential, and the natural, all 

 founded on the fructification alone, and not on the in- 

 florescence, nor any other part. 



The first of these serves only to discriminate gene- 

 ra that happen to come together in the same artificial 



