Philosophical Character of Decandolle. 205 



And whereas the Alps of Dauphiny and the Pyrenees exhibit 

 the influence upon vegetation of an atmosphere rarified by the 

 elevated nature of their position, the long extent of the coast 

 may enable us to contrast the productions of a climate modi- 

 fied by the effect of the sea, with that which belongs more pe- 

 culiarly to the interior of continents. 



It was not till after the completion of this great work, when 

 his authority, as an accurate, as well as a profound botanist, 

 had been established throughout Eiu'ope, both by the estima- 

 tion in which his publications were held, and also by the re- 

 putation of the lectures he delivered at Montpellier, where, in 

 1810, he had been appointed professor of botany to the Uni- 

 versity, that he ventured upon that admirable Treatise, which 

 was intended, at once to establish a code of la7vs for directing 

 future botanists in their description and arrangement of the 

 species of plants, and to explain the philosophical principles 

 upon which such laws were to be justified. 



It is far from my intention to ascribe to Mons. Decandolle 

 the sole merit of the views which he promulgated in the work 

 alluded to, for of all men certainly he is the one who least re- 

 quu-es from his biographer the sacrifice of the reputation of 

 other philosophers, to enhance the glory of his own. 



Linnseus himself, indeed, had expressed in the strongest 

 terms his sense of the importance of a natural classification, 

 and had thrown together the greater part of the then known 

 genera of plants in groups or families, designated by their ap- 

 propriate names, though without defining the characters of the 



latter. 



Bernard de Jussieu, in France, had also exemplified this 

 method, by his arrangement of the plants in the royal garden 

 at Trianon, although he did not reduce to writing the princi- 

 ples on which he had proceeded. 



Adanson had gone somewhat further, by labouring to estab- 

 lish the necessity of founding a system of classification, not on 

 one, but on all the organs of a plant collectively ; but he too 

 stopped short of the mark, by not sufficiently appreciating the 

 relative importance of the several organs, thus placing them 

 all, as it were, upon the same level, and estimating the affini- 



