THE CLASSIFICATION OF PLANTS. 405 



information is a great help to the workmen of science ; and no 

 department has gained more thereby than Botany, which, through 

 the facihties atiforded by the artificial method devised by Lin- 

 naeus, has had its facts amassed in enormous quantity for the 

 use of its more philosophic votaries, and owes its present ad- 

 vanced state, in a great measure, to such humble means. 



" The clue to the labyrinth, then, having served such a noble 

 purpose, becomes a consecrated object, and should rather be 

 hung up in the temple than thrown aside with ignominy. The 

 traveller, returning from his adventurous and perilous journey 

 of discovery, hangs up his knapsack with aifection on the wall 

 of his study. But travellers must return to the fields if more is 

 to be done — and so must botanists ; and each must have re- 

 course, again and again, to those helps which aided them so 

 well in their earliest journeys." 



In both artificial and natural systems, the lower divisions 

 — namely, the genera and species, are the same, the difference 

 between them consisting in the manner in which they are 

 grouped into orders and classes. Thus in the Linnaean and 

 other artificial systems, one, or at most a few characters are 

 arbitrarily selected, and the whole plants in the Vegetable 

 Kingdom are distributed under classes and orders according to 

 the con-espondence or difference of the several genera in such 

 respects, no regard being had to any other characters. The 

 plants in the classes and orders of an artificial system have, 

 therefore, no necessaiy agreement with one another, except in 

 the characters selected for convenience as the types of those 

 divisions respectively. Hence such a system may be compared 

 to a dictionary, in which words are arranged, for convenience of 

 reference, in an alphabetical order, adjacent Avords having no 

 necessary agreement with each other, except in commencing 

 with the same letter. In the Natural System, on the contrary, 

 all the characters of the genera are taken into consideration, 

 and these are grouped together into orders which correspond 

 in the greatest number of important characters ; and these orders 

 are again united, upon the same principles, into groups of a 

 higher order, namely, the classes. While it must be evident, 

 therefore, that all the knowledge we necessarily gain by an 

 artificial system, is the name of an unknown plant ; on the other 

 hand, by the Natural System, we learn not only the name, but 

 also its relations to the plants by which it is surrounded, and 

 hence we get a clue to its structure, properties, and history. 

 Thus, supposing we find a plant, and wish to ascertain its name, 

 if we turn to the Linnaean System, and find that such a plant is 

 the Menyanihes trifoliata, this name is the whole amount of the 

 knowledge we have gained ; but, by turning to the Natural 

 System instead, and finding that our plant belongs to the order 



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