THE JUSSIEUS AND THE NATURAL METHOD. 251 



the observations made hy sundry botanists during the lapse of nearly fifty 

 years in different foreign countries ; observations which can only be rtmdered of 

 advantage to botany by referring them to the place which they would naturally 

 occupy, and which M. Tournefort would not have failed to a3!>ign them, had he 

 lived till this day." 



The modification, or, to use his own phrase, the new ferfection, which Antoine 

 proposes to introduce into the method of Tournefort, does not in effect intrench 

 upon the spirit, the essence of that method. It proposes, as he explains, only 

 to add certain new classes or sections in order convenient!}'' to admit the plants 

 recently discovei-ed in foreign countries ; but he has done more than he proposed ; 

 for a question of pure method, he substitutes another wholly different and new, 

 which as yet had no name, and which we now call a question of botanical 

 geography. He establishes these three points : first, that our continent has a 

 multitude of plants which are peculiar to it and which are not found in the nev/, 

 and that the new, in turn, has a multitude of others which are not found in the old ; 

 secondly, that the greater part of the plants which occur with us arrange them- 

 selves in classes into which but few foreign ones enter, and conversely ; and 

 thirdly, that in the two continents there are a certain number of plants which 

 pertain to both, and aiTange themselves under common classes. These three 

 propositions are strictly correct ; and to appreciate their merit, it is enough to 

 remember that at the moment when Antoine wrote, the able dissertation of Buffon 

 on the distinction between the animals of the two continents did not yet exist.* 



Strictly speaking. Antoine never occupied himself with method. We see this 

 in the care with which he deprecates an intention of interfering with that of 

 Tournefort ; still more clearly from his Discours sur les j^rogres de la hotanique, 

 and more than all from the Introduction a la connaissance des plantes. He says, 

 in the Discours, with reference to Fagon, who had called Tournefort to the Jardin 

 Royal : "For what advances is not botany indebted to him in the choice of the 

 most excellent person who had yet appeared, since he was skilful enough to 

 fix the principles of a science which till then had floated in uncertainty '\ " 

 And in the Introduction, " the most perfect of methods being necessarily that 

 of which the rules are the most simple and invariable, there is none more distin- 

 guished by these characters than that which teaches us to know plants by their 

 tiowers and their fruits." Now, the method which teaches us to know plants 

 by their flowers and fruits is that of Tournefort ; and the whole Introduction of 

 Antoine de Jussieu is litlle more than a siimmary exposition of that method. 

 Nevertheless, thanks to Vaillant,t he hsti already formed more just ideas 

 respecting the flowers, particularly the statnens, which Tournefort only regarded 

 as excretory vessels. " We understand," says Antoine, " by flowers that combina- 

 tion of parts called stameiis and pistils, serving for their multiplication." 



A passage in his Discours paints, in an artless manner, the pleasure which the 

 Jardin Royal yields to those who frequent it in the pursuit of science : " How 

 great the satisfaction of being able, within so limited a space, to see at once 

 whatever, in both the Old and New World, is most curious in the domain of vege- 

 table nature ; to be able in an instant to compare the imperfect state of botany 

 among the ancients with that which we witness to-day ; to have facilities for 

 recognizing on the spot so many plants which it has been necessary to seek 

 beyond seas and upon mountain ranges ; without trouble to reap the benefit of dis- 

 coveries which have cost so much suffering and toil to explorers, and to have it 

 in our power to discriminate at a glance, and in the same parterre, so mtich of 

 what constitutes the separate riches of each nation." 



* Antoine died in 1758, and the volume of Bufion on the distinct animals of the two con- 

 tinents appeared in 1771. 



t It is proper to recall that six years before the celebrated Discours of Vaillant, a memoir 

 had been published by Claude Joseph Geoffrey, of the French Academy, on tlic Structure and 

 use of the principal parts of flowers, in which the sexual organs of plapts are detnoustrated. 



