HISTORY OF BOTANY. 63 



of it. Buffon saj^s on this subject : — " This pretension of 

 botanists to establish general sj^stems, perfect and methodi- 

 cal, has then little foundation ; and their labours have only 

 availed to give us defective methods, which have been 

 successively demolished the one by the other, and have 

 suffered the usual fate of all systems founded on arbitrary 

 principles; and that which has most contributed to the 

 substituting of one of such methods for another, is the 

 liberty that botanists have given themselves, to choose 

 arbitrarily a single part of plants and to make of it a specific 

 character : some establish their method on the shape of the 

 leaves, others on their position, others on the form of the 

 flowers, others on the number of their petals, and still 

 others on the number of their stamens. If I should 

 recal in detail all the methods that have been thought of 

 I should never finish, but I shall only treat of those that 

 have been received with favour, and have followed, each 

 in its turn, without sufficient attention being paid to that 

 error in principle which is common to them all, and which 

 consists in trying to judge of a whole, or the combination 

 of several wholes, by a single part, and by the comparison 

 of the differences in this single part." 



But notwithstanding the Linnean system has been super- 

 seded by a more scientific one, its study must be recom- 

 mended to botanical tyros as a great assistance towards the 

 mastery of the larger, and more perfect plan in many ways. 

 The latter in its bare simplicity is so abstruse as to be 

 quite incomprehensible to the beginner, and in order to 

 guide him to the name of a plant which he may have found, 

 artificial keys are made, which frequently turn out to be far 

 more bewildering than the Linnean arrangement. 



It is not, however, so much botanical classification that we 

 are concerned with, as nomenclature, and this Linneus may 

 be said to have based on such sound principles that in 



