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abundant discrimination, instead of philosophical 
combinations.” “This,” he asserts, “is the bane of 
natural science at the present day. Hence the filum 
Ariadneum is lost, or wilfully thrown away, and a 
bandage darkens the sight of the teacher no less 
than that of the student.” 
Yet Sir James cannot be said to stand alone and 
unsupported in his opinion. “The question,” he 
remarks, “of the natural or artificial character of 
Jussieu’s system has been ably discussed by the 
celebrated Mr. Roscoe in the Transactions of the 
Linnean Society, vol. xi.p.50; who, in showing that 
this method involves severalas unnaturalassemblages 
as the professedly artificial system of Linnzus, 
contends that little is to be gained by its adoption 
with respect to a conformity to nature.” And in 
the fifteenth volume of the Society’s Transactions, 
Mr. Bicheno, in a paper on Systems and Methods 
in Natural History, observes, “that the two great 
masters of botanical science (Linnzus and Jussieu) 
propose different ends, and ought not to be regarded 
as rivals. Division and separation are the ends of 
the artificial system ; to establish agreements, is the 
end of the natural.” 
Following the same idea, the Rev. E. B. Ramsay, 
in a biographical notice of his lamented friend, 
printed in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, ob- 
serves, that “there is no point on which young 
botanists are more mistaken than in their ideas of 
natural classification. They often imagine they have 
only to commence the study of natural arrangements, 
and become at once profound philosophical bota- 
