XXXVl HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION. 



We have now arrived In our rapid survey at the end of the 

 first quarter of the 18th centur}-, and what do we find? Through 

 the activity and enterprise of traders, new exotic plants were 

 almost daily being acquired from various quarters of the globe ; 

 from North America and the West Indies, from Africa, India, 

 and the Malay Archipelago, were brought wondrously strange 

 flowers. The Dutch possessions in tropical Asia contributed 

 greatly to the increasing riches of the gardens of the wealthy, 

 and the cultivation of such plants was diligently followed in 

 the Netherlands. From this active centre were issued the 

 early works of the great reformer of natural science and its 

 nomenclature, Linnaeus. The stream of new discoveries bade 

 fair to outpace the descriptive powers of the then- existing 

 botanists ; the old systems were overlaid and hidden under 

 the new acquisitions, and the specific names were growing 

 portentously long. The artificial system of Linnaeus served 

 for nearly a century as a means of readily sorting the augment- 

 ing stores sent home by the many travellers in search of 

 plants, but one of the greatest benefits he conferred was the 

 methodical arrangement and system of description which he 

 introduced. His first specific names were limited to twelve 

 words, diagnostic of the species, but the splendid advance 

 achieved by the use of a single word as a trivial name was first 

 shown in 1749, in the Pan suecus, which forms part of vol. ii. of 

 the Amoeuifates Academicae ; henceforth it became of universal 

 use, and is considered by Mons. Alphonse de CandoUe as the 

 greatest boon even Linnaeus bestowed upon natural history. 

 Linnaeus continued the leading master-mind in botany until 

 his death ; of his contemporaries we need only mention 

 Albrecht von Haller, with his important Bihliotheca hotanica, 

 and his imposing folio on the Swiss flora. 



The first Linnean flora of Britain was due to that curious 

 individual Sir John Hill, Knight of the Polar Star, who 

 arranged Dillenius's edition of Ray's Synopsis in the order of 



