204 Biographical Memoir ofM. Claude Louis Richard. 

 modern botanists, like those legislators of old whose laws were 

 but the more religiously observed that they were not written. 



Bernard de Jussieu was not a great man only, he was also a 

 benevolent man, adored by his pupils, because he loved them, 

 and interested himself in their welfare not less than in their in- 

 struction. A young man so devoted to science as M. Richard, 

 and who showed at the same time so much judgment, could not 

 escape his notice. He admitted him to his intimacy, initiated 

 him in his views, and even directed the first researches which his 

 able pupil ventured to make into the numerous families of the 

 vegetable kingdom, whose organization was not yet entirely 

 known. 



The encouragements of so great a master, at length embold- 

 ened our young gardener to shew that he also was a bo- 

 tanist. He ventured to read to the Academy a memoir on one 

 of the most difficult questions in the science, and by this fortu- 

 nate temerity, placed himself in some measure, all at once, in 

 the first ranks of its cultivators. 



The genera Cynanchum and Asclepias, in the family of 

 Apocynese, were, at that time, the subject of the keenest discus- 

 sions. The interior of their flowers presents, around the pistil, 

 various circles of organs, none which has very decidedly the 

 ordinary form of an anther. Those of the outer row exhibit 

 each a small horn, from the bottom of which rises a bent thread. 

 Between them is a pentagonal body formed by the union of five 

 vertical scales, which open, each at its upper part, into two 

 small cells. This body is surmounted by a kind of pentagonal 

 capital, hollowed above, with five small fissures, and on the sides 

 with five small fossae, tallying with an equal number of small 

 black bodies, divided and prolonged each into two yellow and gra- 

 nulated filaments, resembling two clubs or two small spatulae, and 

 which sink into the cells of the vertical scales which correspond 

 to them. The problem was to determine which of these com- 

 plicated organs are the true anthers ; and so much the more 

 importance was attached to it, that the sexual system founded 

 upon the stamina ai.d pistils was then exclusively received in 

 botany. There had been almost as many opinions on the sub- 

 ject as there were celebrated botanists. Linnaeus considered the 



