LINNEHAN ADDRESS—GREENE. 705 
the twentieth. In other phrase, that doctrine of the organization 
and the functions of the flower which Vaillant set forth as new in 
the year 1717 has held undisputed sway, without significant aug- 
mentation or amendment, for now 190 years. Every botanist will 
readily perceive that this isa very rare encomium. Every one will 
realize that to very few can it have been given to lay down the funda- 
mentals of plant taxonomy. Those fundamentals, as we have all 
been taught, and as our forefathers were taught, are really only two, 
namely, carpology and anthology. Czsalpino in the year 1583 estab- 
lished the true carpology; Vaillant in 1717 the true anthology. These 
were the two great things to be done before there could be a true and 
philosophic system of botanical classification. Now which of these 
two names is greatest in scientific botany may be open to learned dis- 
pute; but so long as the accepted foundations of botany remain in 
place, successful competitors for their exalted rank there can be none. 
Five years after having published this masterpiece of plant or- 
ganography Vaillant died. His death occurred on his fifty-third 
birthday. He also died unthanked for the greatest of several great 
things that he had done for botany. All the world botanical still 
idolized the memory of the great and popular Tournefort, and it 
resented that virtual overthrow of his whole system which this re- 
markable former student of his had accomplished. Universally and 
bitterly they charged him with ingratitude. And so that inaugural 
address, in which this far greater man than Tournefort had given to 
his science the very best that was in him, became an offense to the 
blind invidious multitude. When they should have praised him, they 
blamed him; and he lay down and died. 
But afar in the north, in the land of giants mythical and giants 
real, there was an ungigantic youth of great mind and of noble soul, 
who would champion most successfully the cause of Sebastian 
Vaillant, and in so doing create a new system of botany that should 
supersede that of Tournefort. 
It was in the year 1729, when Linnus was in his twenty-third year, 
and a student at Upsala, that he first became acquainted with Vail- 
lant’s great tract, learning from it that those obscure and long 
neglected stamens and pistils were sexual organs and the only really 
important parts of any flower. This being true, it was plain to him, 
as it had been to Vaillant, that Tournefort’s classes of plants estab- 
lished upon the corolla as the essential organ were unphilosophically 
and untenably based, and must fall. From that day Linnezus deter- 
mined to work out a new system of classes and orders of plants, on 
the basis of stamens and pistils as the most important floral organs. 
The result was 24 classes of plants established upon characteristics 
of the stamens, instead of the 22 classes of Tournefort distinguished 
