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task of defining natural orders by technical characters is 

 first attempted. His affected orthography and arbitrary 

 nomenclature render it scarcely possible, without disgust, 

 to trace his ideas ; which however, when developed, prove 

 less original than they at first appear. His work is written 

 avowedly to supersede the labours of Linnaeus, against 

 whom, after courting his correspondence, he took some 

 personal displeasure; and yet many of his leading cha- 

 racters are borrowed from the sexual system. The dis- 

 criminative marks of his 58 families are taken from the 

 following sources — leaves, sex of the flowers, situation 

 of the flowers with respect to the germen, form and situ- 

 ation of the corolla, stamens, gerrnens, and seeds. Every 

 family is divided into several sections, under each of which 

 the genera are in like manner synoptically arranged, and 

 discriminated by their leaves, inflorescence, calyx, corolla, 

 stamens, pistil, fruit, and seeds. In the detail of his sy- 

 stem, Adanson labours to overset the principle, so much 

 insisted on by Linnaeus and his school, and to which the 

 great names of Conrad Gesner, and Caesalpinus are chiefly 

 indebted for their botanical fame, that the genera of 

 plants are to be characterized by the parts of fructifica- 

 tion alone. The experienced botanist knows that this is 

 often but a dispute of words ; Linnaeus having, in arrang- 

 ing the umbelliferous plants, resorted to the inflorescence, 

 under the denomination of a receptacle; — see his 45th 

 natural order. But it appears to us that the characters 

 deduced from thence are in themselves faulty, being often 

 uncertain, and not seldom unnatural ; and that the plants 

 in question may be better discriminated by their flowers 

 and seeds. Adanson however prefers the inflorescence, 

 even in the Verticillata of Linnaeus ; for no reason, that 

 we can discover, but because Linnaeus has so much better 

 defined the genera of those plants by the calyx and co- 

 rolla. It were a needless and ungrateful task to carp at 

 the mistakes of this or any writer on natural classification, 

 with regard to the places allotted for difficult genera, be- 



