566 



instead of a disinterested love of science and truth. Hence 

 the so often repeated exclamations against Linnaeus, as a 

 mere nomenclator. Of his didactic precision, and philo- 

 sophical principles of discrimination, such critics were 

 not jealous, for they could not estimate the value nor the 

 consequences of these. But they could all feel that the 

 nomenclature of Tournefort was giving way, and that 

 their efforts to support it were vain. The writer of these 

 remarks has perceived traces of this feeling in almost 

 every publication and conversation, of a certain descrip- 

 tion of botanists. He has likewise perceived that it would 

 gradually subside, and that the interests of science were 

 secure. The nomenclature of Linnaeus has in the end 

 prevailed, and it were unjust now, to the greatest botanists 

 of the French school, to deny them the honour of liberality 

 on this head. 



It is time for us to close this article, with a view of the 

 principles, upon which the eminent systematics, to whom 

 we have so often alluded, have planned and executed 

 their schemes of botanical classification. 



Here the learned and truly estimable Bernard de Jus- 

 sieu, the contemporary of Linnaeus in the earlier part of 

 his career, first claims our notice. This great practical 

 botanist, too diffident of his own knowledge, extensive as 

 it was, to be over anxious to stand forth as a teacher, did 

 not promulgate any scheme of natural arrangement till the 

 year 1759, when the royal botanic garden at Trianon 

 was submitted to his direction. His system was pub- 

 lished by his nephew in 1789, at the head of his own 

 work, of which it makes the basis. It appears in the 

 form of a simple list of genera, under the name of each 

 order, without any definition, just like the Fragmenta of 

 Linnaeus, at the end of his Genera Pluntarum. 



In 1763 a very active and zealous systematic, M. 

 Adanson, made himself known to the world by the publi- 

 cation of his Families des Plantes. In this learned and 

 ingenious, though whimsical and pedantic, work, the great 





