464 



They set off with alacrity, but were soon entangled in 

 their own difficulties, and were left by Linnaeus to answer 

 themselves or each other. We here mention these learned 

 systematics, for learned they were thought by themselves 

 and their pupils, merely because they will scarcely require 

 animadversion, when we come to canvass the great ques- 

 tion of natural and artificial classification, they having had 

 no distinct ideas of a difference between the two. Hedwig 

 used frequently to lament, that his preceptor Ludwig had 

 never perfected his system of arrangement; but from 

 what he has given to the world, we see no great room to 

 suppose he had any thing very excellent in reserve. Un- 

 executed projects are magnified in the mists of uncer- 

 tainty. We have ventured elsewhere, in a biographical 

 account of Hedwig, to remark, that even that ingenious 

 man " did not imbibe under Ludwig, anything of the true 

 philosophical principles of arrangement, the talents for 

 which are granted to very few, and are scarcely ever of 

 German growth. We mean no invidious reflections on 

 any nation or people. Each has its appropriate merits, 

 and all are useful together in science, like different cha- 

 racters on the theatre of human life." 



Germany may well dispense with any laurels obtained 

 by the very secondary merit of speculative schemes of 

 classification, when she can claim the honour of having 

 produced such a practical observer as Gaertner. This in- 

 defatigable botanist devoted himself to the investigation 

 of the fruits and seeds of plants. Being eminently skilled 

 in the use of the pencil, he has, like Hedwig, faithfully 

 recorded, what he no less acutely detected. The path he 

 struck out for himself, of delineating and describing in 

 detail, with magnified dissections, every part of the seed 

 and seed-vessel of each genus within his reach, had never 

 been explored before in so regular and methodical a man- 

 ner. Botanists of the Linnaean school are justly cen- 

 surable for having paid too little attention to the structure 

 of these important parts, in their generic characters. In- 



