. Botanical Literature, Old and New. 



VI. 



Josephi Pitton Tournefort, * * * Instilufiones Rei 

 HerbaricB. Edito altera * * Parisiis, 1700. 



Viewed impartially, with a mind as far as possible free 

 from that bias which naturally warps the judgment in favor 

 of things done nearer our own times, this book, now nearly 

 two centuries old, will appear as the most conspicuous land- 

 mark in the history of Systematic Botany. To Tournefort 

 has been conceded always not only the honors due a most 

 luminous advocate of the Natural System of classification; 

 he has been styled the scientific founder of genera. The last 

 claim— and it is the most significant one ever made in favor 

 of any botanist— is based upon this, that his is the first 

 elaborate and universal treatise on the genera and species of 

 plants in which the genera are determined, in the main, 

 according to certain fixed principles of organography; the 

 application of those principles being limited or modified only 

 in deference to matters of habit and sensible properties in 

 the plants. The credit of having originally enunciated these 

 more scientific principles of classification Tournefort is far 

 from arrogating to himself. He attributes them to their 

 actual discoverer, Fabius Columna, a Roman botanist of a 

 century earlier.^ Conrad Gesner, a contemporary of Columna, 



'■ The following may pass for a not unfaithful free rendering of 

 Columna's modest statement of his principles : " In the constitutii.g of 

 genera I have not made much of the form of the leaves ; for 1 judge the 

 nffimties of plants to be indicated not bv the leaves, but by the flower, 

 the seed-vessel, and above all by the seeds themselves; especial atten- 

 hon being given to any agreement among plants in respect to flavor." 

 See Tourn. Inst. i. 5:3. 



