Antoin^-Laurent Jussieit. 9 



against the technical part of the classification was notorious 

 and serious, and at first he entered a protest against the in- 

 troduction of the Linnaean names ; M. de Jussieu's first task, 

 then, was to convince the eloquent zoologist that these names 

 constituted one of the happiest changes which had been ef- 

 fected in Natural History ; and he added that the Garden at 

 Pai'is should not be second in any improvement whatever ; 

 and to these convincing arguments BuflFon soon yielded. 

 The Jar din cles Plantes received, at one and the same time, 

 the nomenclature of Linnaeus, and the natural orders of 

 Bernard. 



These natural orders, such as Bernard had recognised them, 

 were comprehended in seven classes. Lam'ent perceived the 

 necessity of multiplying them, and he precisely doubled their 

 number, making fourteen. The lobes of the embryo supplied 

 the three first : hence the famous division of the whole of 

 the vegetable kingdom into the acoti/ledonous, monocotyle- 

 donous, and dicotyledonous plants ; and the insertion of the 

 stamens upon the pistil, upon the support of the pistil, upon 

 the calyx, or upon the corolla, supplied the rest. Thus, 

 two orders of character, the former drawn from the em- 

 bryo, and the latter from the relative insertion of the dif- 

 ferent parts of the flower, supplied all the classes. Characters, 

 of less and less importance, aftbrded other groups, viz. the 

 families, the genera, and the species : the whole of the groups 

 subordinated themselves in the arrangement, as the charac- 

 ters themselves did in nature ; and the fundamental and con- 

 stituent principle of the arrangement, derived from nature 

 itself, is the relative imjiortance of the characters. 



But this relative importance of characters^ the basis of the 

 whole edifice of the arrangement — how was it to be estimated 

 in its turn — how was it to be valued with certainty .? Here 

 two methods present themselves, which are equally certain. 

 One, which is founded upon reasoning, du'ectly infers the im- 

 portance of a character from the importance of the part which 

 supplies it. In a vegetable, every thing contributes to the 

 formation of the flower ; every thing in the flower contributes 

 to the formation of the embryo, or the new existence ; the 

 formation, then, of this new existence, or being, of the embryo, 



