704 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1907. 
The earlier disciples of Cesalpino made many amendments and 
signal improvements of his system, through further study of floral 
structure, as furnishing yet other clews to plant affinities. The 
summing up of these many improvements was made by Tournefort. 
whose Elements of Botany, published in 1694, 111 years after Cesal- 
pino’s great work, and 13 years before the birth of Linneus, took 
the whole botanical world captive, and held undisputed sway, until 
everywhere but in France, the native land of Tournefort, they were 
superseded by the system of Linnezeus. 
To the botanists present who are unread in the history of our 
science nothing will be more surprising than the information that, 
with the great Tournefort, who founded upon the flower the most 
universally approved system of botany which, up to that time had 
been presented, the flower was hardly anything more than what we 
know as the corolla. Of the functions of stamens, stigmas, and styles 
he was ignorant, confessed his ignorance, and regarded them as 
wholly insignificant things, hardly to be seriously taken note of. 
The flower and the corolla were with him almost synonymous; and 
yet so uncertain was he in his identification of the corolla that where, 
as in all the Araces, it is absent, he took the spathe for the corolla, 
while in such apetalous things as the castor bean he regarded the 
brightly colored stigmas as the corolla. Such extremely crude 
ideas of floral structure were those of Tournefort to the end of his 
career; and he died when the infant Linneeus was 14 years old. 
Now the Linnean doctrine of the flower and that of Tournefort 
represent opposite extremes. To be more specific: While Tourne- 
fort’s conception of the flower as an organism is about as crude and 
imperfect as can well be imagined, that of Linneus is almost perfect. 
In the view of the former the one important organ is the corolla, the 
stamens and stigmas nothing, or next to nothing; according to Lin- 
neeus, the stamens and stigmas, with the ovary, are the only essential 
organs of the flower, the corolla relatively unimportant. AJl the 
world botanical now understands that the philosophy of floral struc- 
ture upheld and most effectively promulgated by Linneus was the 
right one. The actual discovery and demonstration of this new and 
revolutionary anthology are not attributable to Linneus. In the year 
that the small boy Linneus left home for the Latin school at Wexi6 
a new incumbent was installed into that professorial chair at Paris 
which Tournefort had occupied. The new professor had been one of 
the pupils of that celebrity. His name was Sebastian Vaillant. The 
subject of his inaugural address was The Structure of Flowers. In 
this address, soon afterwards printed, Tournefort’s anthology was 
completely undermined, and what was offered in the place of it be- 
came the accepted anthology of the remaining 80 years of the eight- 
eenth century, of the whole of the nineteenth, and is thus far that of 
