CLASSIFICATION. 41 



country, their noblest representatives are the ferns, those charming 

 plants which grace every wood and shady bank with their light-green 

 arching plumes, and are so curious in the brown spangles of their 

 under surface. A particular account of the whole of the flowerless 

 plants will come on by and by, under special heads ; here it is suffi- 

 cient to point to the fern, the common mushroom, and the black 

 tangles left on the shore by the retiring tide, as supplying fair ideas 

 of their diversified and extraordinary aspects. 



CLASSIFICATION. 



No department of Botany is more urgently important than Classifi- 

 cation. The quantity of plants to be dealt with is so prodigious, that 

 until in some measure classified, if but in theory, there is nothing but 

 confusion and bewilderment. The pressing consciousness of the need 

 of classification, in the early days of Botany, originated scores of 

 difierent schemes intended to meet it ; and so intimately is sound 

 and philosophical Botany identified with a correct arrangement of 

 plants according to their affinities, that nature's own plan, or the 

 "Natural System," has been from the beginning, with everj- genuine 

 botanist, the paramount object of research. Tournefort, a famous 

 Frenchman, constructed an ingenious system dependent on the shape 

 of the flower ; other botanists tried to make the leaves and the fruits 

 serve the purpose they had in view ; Linntcus, who first gave solidity 

 and coherence to botanical knowledge, skilfully took the stamens and 

 pistils, and contrived a method which, though purely artificial, has 

 made his name illustrious for ever, so successful was it in removing 

 the difficulties of the age, and giving that precision and facility to 

 botanical investigations, to which the present high position of the 

 science of Botany is mainly owing. In the present volume we pro- 

 ceed upon the Natural System, or that which arranges plants into 

 their families, seeing that it is now sufficiently matured to answer 

 every purpose, and is much more solidly useful and instructive than 

 the Liuua?an, both at the beginning and continuously, since the 

 former only takes us to a certain point, and has then no more to offer. 



Classification by the Natural System begins with the separation of 

 plants into the grand divisions described above, and called "Perfect" 

 and "Imperfect." Each of these great divisions is then resolved into 

 two classes, called " primary," and each of the classes into sections, 

 from wliich we move forwards in turn to the families. The family. 



