BOTANICAL LITEIiATURE. 205 



The scientific basis of genera, if it exist, is yet to be dis- 

 covered. There is no rale — there is no set of rules— by which 

 plant-genera may be determined. If ever such a set of rules, 

 founded in nature, and correctly formulated, shall be drawn 

 up, then will systematic botanists be brought to agreement 

 respecting the limits of every genus/ The dawn of such a 

 happy era may be near or remote, or it may never come at 

 all ; meanwhile it would be advantageous to botany if, 

 retaining all which has been accumulated in the line of actual 

 knowledge, we could divest it of certain trammels of empiri- 

 cism and pedantry with which it has for many generations been 

 more or less seriously affected. It surely is not scientific, 

 but rather empirical, to found genera, after the Linnsean 

 method, absolutely upon flower and fruit irrespective of 

 habit and qualities. And, as in every branch of knowledge 

 there inheres a tendency to the pedantic, strong in about the 

 ratio of its inexactness as a science, so is modern systematic 

 botany grown rather too self-conscious and too self-assertive 

 of its claims ; for, while the primitive idea was this artistic 

 rather than scientific one, that a genus is so natural as to be 

 recognizable by a general impression made, and without the 

 aid of any precise organographic description, that has been 

 forced to give place to an opposite conception perhaps as far 

 from the truth, that a family of plants is not a family, nor a 

 genus a genus, independent of a Latin name and a set of 

 botanical phrases descriptive of the flower and fruit ; from 

 which standpoint it is held that genera have neither history 

 nor names anterior to certain authors, and that the Fathers 



of Botany were not botanists. 



These strictures, I am glad to admit, have their most exact 

 application to the botany of one or two generations ago 

 The abandonment of the Linnaean and wholly empirical 



' We evade all this now by denying that either species or genera or 

 orders exist in nature. It were as reasonable to try banish fron. the 

 minds of men the ideas of a vegetable kingdon. and an animal kingdom^^ 

 for we can no more set perfect organographic boundane. to these than 

 We cau to geiiera and species. 



