Antoiiie-Laurent Jussieu. 17 



These two attempts, however, presented nothing more than a 

 series of names, without any explication, development, or the 

 slightest indication of the motives which had influenced the 

 author, either in the formation or the classification of his fami- 

 lies : it was, as M. de Jussieu remarked, " a kind of problem, 

 which Linnaeus left to be solved by his successors," but which 

 never has been solved. A more complete work, and, as it 

 relates to Natural families, a much more important one, was 

 that of Adanson, published in the year 1763. That feature in 

 Adanson which strikes us as the most remarkable, is his charac- 

 ter as a Reformer. Even in his first work, his Histoire Natu- 

 relle du Senegal, this trait is conspicuous, in which, as it re- 

 gards the classification of shell-fish, he altered it from top to 

 bottom, and at once placed it upon its true basis, namely, 

 upon the contained animals, — the shell-fish, of which the 

 shells are, in fact, only the coverings. But his original and 

 renovating genius appeared still more conspicuously in his 

 work upon the Families des Flantes. No man more than 

 Adanson ever endeavoured to free the science from its syste- 

 matic trammels ; no one has more thoroughly demonstrated 

 the radical fault of all artificial systems, viz. theii* being jmr- 

 tial, as founded upon a single pai-t, upon a single organ, 

 and that organ arbitrarily selected ; no one, in fine, has more 

 distinctly perceived, that the arrangement, to be natural, or, 

 in other words, complete, must repose upon the universality 

 of its parts. What he failed in perceiving was the subordi- 

 nation of these parts to one another : and the immense in- 

 fluence of prepossession, even in a mind of his caliber, may 

 be seen in the following sentence of Adanson' s Report to the 

 Academy upon M. de Jussieu's Memoir. " The principles of M. 

 de Jussieu," says Adanson, in an unedited document preserved 

 in our archives, " will experience opposition on the part of bo- 

 tanists who conceive that, for an arrangement to be natural, it 

 must be founded upon all the parts taken together, without 

 giving an exclusive preference to one over the rest." Adanson's 

 mistake must here be evident to every one. What he objects 

 to in the phrase exclusive preference, is precisely the subordi- 

 nation of parts ; and, by rejecting the subordination of parts or 

 of characters, he thereby also rejects that of groups, at least 

 vol.. xxvii. NO. Lin. — .in.Y 1831). b 



