294 PITTONIA. 
in common with that genus. Whither should it be trans- 
ferred ? No student or amateur who is familiar with certain 
plantain-leaved and white-flowered species of crowfoot which 
inhabit certain mountain distriets of the Old World, should 
be surprised to learn that our present Alisma, on being 
removed from Plantago was first placed in the genus Ranun- 
culus. Men had not yet learned to distinguish the two 
great classes, monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous, of the 
phanerogams, and so, the reference of Alisma and Sagittaria 
to Ranunculus was, in the light of that still early day, quite 
rational and scientific. The distinct hypogynous deciduous 
sepals, petals and stamens, and the heads of compressed 
achenes are much the same thing in Ranunculus and Alisma; 
but one is a genus of exogens, the other, of endogens; and 
the interior of the seed being overlooked, we have quite a 
congeneric similarity in the anthology and carpolology of the 
two; but the resemblances are those of analogy merely, not 
of affinity. 
The day will not return when great and learned and philo- 
sophical botanists will approve such a thing as the fusion of 
Alisma and Ranunculus in one genus; but one might dare 
to predict a time when men will have come to regard many of 
our accepted, families, genera, and species even, as having 
been quite as artificially compounded as the Ranunculus of 
Tournefort. 
The natural system of botanical classification will never be 
perfected,—is not likely to be advanced much beyond its 
present halting stage,’ until botanists shall recognize the fact 
_that mere morphology, whether of flower or fruit, is not 
always a sure criterion of affinity; that while similar antho- 
logical and earpologieal characters do most commonly indi- 
! Tournefort so disposed of the plant, calling it Ranunculus palustris, 
Plantaginis folio ampliore (Inst. Rei Herb. 292), and he had a following in 
the matter, but for a few years only. 
* The modern decline of interest in systematic botany has been pub- 
liely noted by many writers, and more talked of and deplored in secret 
converse, among the survivors of an elder generation. 
