490 



others, whose acquisitions have long slept in the Parisian 

 museums. Happily there seems to have arisen of late a 

 commendable desire to render them useful by publication, 

 and thus many fine plants, known merely by the slight 

 and unscientific appellations of Tournefort, and therefore 

 never adopted by Linnaeus, have recently been clearly de- 

 fined, or elegantly delineated. The journeys of Olivier 

 and Michaux towards the east have enriched the Paris 

 gardens, and been the means of restoring several lost 

 Tournefortian plants. We believe however that the En- 

 glish nurseries have proved the most fertile source of aug- 

 mentation to the French collections, as appears by the 

 pages of all the recent descriptive writers in France. 



We dare not presume to arrange the indefatigable and 

 very original botanist Lamarck among the Linnaean bota- 

 nists of his country; but we beg leave to mention him here, 

 as one who has thought for himself, and whose works are 

 the better for that reason. His severe and often petulant 

 criticisms of the Swedish teacher, made him appear more 

 hostile than he really was, to the principles of that great 

 man. Being engaged in the botanical department of the 

 Encyc/opedie Methodique, he was obliged to conform to 

 an alphabetical arrangement ; but he surely might have 

 chosen the scientific generic names for that purpose, in- 

 stead of barbarous or vernacular ones, which, to foreign- 

 ers, would have made all the difference between a com- 

 modious and an unintelligible disposition of his work. In 

 the detail of his performance, he has great merit, both 

 with respect to clearing up obscure species, or describing 

 new ones, and he had the advantage of access, on many 

 occasions, to Commerson's collection. Lamarck's Flore 

 Frartfoise, is arranged after a new analytical method of 

 his own. This book however is valuable, independent of 

 its system, as an assemblage of practical knowledge and 

 observation. We have only to regret a wanton and in- 

 convenient change of names, which too often occurs, and 

 which is not always for the better ; witness Cheiranthus 



