410 



for the physician .or the philosopher who will not think for 

 himself, is not likely to be long trusted or respected by 

 others. 



Systematic botany, as a branch of natural history, is 

 conversant with the external forms of things ; but even 

 this is advanced by the study of their internal nature and 

 ceconomy. So the qualities of plants are better understood, 

 the more attentively we scrutinize the laws of their exte- 

 rior configuration. These various inquiries, therefore, may 

 go hand in hand with great advantage ; though they have 

 seldom done so, — as will appear to any one who pays a 

 little attention to the history and progress of each. 



The discrimination of the species of plants, which so 

 long occupied the earlier botanists, whose labours are re- 

 corded for our use in the numerous descriptions and often 

 excellent figures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 

 could scarcely be pursued without leading to some ideas of 

 arrangement or classification. And yet it is a curious fact, 

 that such principles as these early botanists put forth were 

 singularly deficient in accuracy and ingenuity. To class 

 plants according to their being eatable or poisonous, bul- 

 bous or fibrous in their roots, arborescent or herbaceous in 

 their constitution, is, in every point, almost equally futile 

 and uninstructive. Nor is it less curious, that philosophers 

 of great eminence, who long after undertook the investi- 

 gation of the anatomy and philosophy of the vegetable 

 kingdom, were (to their own great disadvantage,) as little 

 attentive to the natural affinities or diversities of plants, in 

 the prosecution of their various experiments and the theo- 

 ries founded upon them. In like manner, the class of pro- 

 fessed systematic writers, in their earliest attempts at ar- 

 rangement, seem to have been led more by rules of tech- 

 nical discrimination than of natural or philosophical com- 

 bination. None of these three descriptions of persons 

 thought of deriving any aid from each other. Hence the 

 reproach not altogether unjustly cast upon systematic 

 botany, or at least upon some systematic botanists, — that 



