Notice of Prof. De Candoile. 223 
But De Candolle had ufdertaken a work perhaps beyond the 
strength of any man, whatever might be his capacity ; and I be- 
lieve no other volume has appeared. 
_ In November, 1823, he finished, at Geneva, the first volume of 
‘a work of infinitely less pretensions, undertaken at the urgent 
request of his friends, which he offered and intended only asa 
rapid survey of plants, to precede his great work, the completion 
of which he still kept in view. He gave it the .modest title of 
Prodromus.* The first volume, Benn et fifty four orders, 
was published in 1824.7 
In the next year came the second volume, containing only ten 
orders, showing that his materials were rapidly accumulating un- 
der his hands, and that he had imperceptibly enlarged his plan. 
This was accompanied by a volume of Memoirs on the Legumi- 
nose,{ with numerous plates. In 1828, ’30, 736, 37 and 738, 
appeared successive volumes of the Prodromus, and within this 
period, ten memoirs on various subjects, with plates, now collected 
in one volume.$ 
During all this time, his vee ao were going on at the Museum 
in Geneva; among others, a course on agricultural botany, of 
the substance of which we have some portion in the graceful dress 
in which it is presented by Mrs. Marcet in that admirable volume 
which she called “Conversations on Vegetable Physiology.”’|| 
of De Lessert, was edited cs B. De Lessert, with one hundred plates by Turpin, 
and vabliched” in Paris in 1820. A similar volume, still better executed, also un- 
der the direction of Turpin, and with one hundred of his engravings, and many 
beautiful dissections, was Saree by De Lessert in 1823, in illustration of the 
Second volume of the Sys eas 
* Prodromus Systema Nataralls Regni Vegetabilis. Parisiis: Treuttel et 
Vurtz. Pars P 18 
t In 1837, De ‘Sociale published a third volume of Illustrations in the same style 
and of the same size of those just noticed, containing figures of some of the rarer 
plants in the first four volumes of the Prodromus, together with those of others 
not described in that work. 
¢ Mémoires sur la Famille des Légumineuses. Paris: 70 planches, 4to. pp. 525. 
§ Collection de dix agree hoor servir a |’ Histoire du Regne Végétal. Paris: 
Treuttel et Wurtz, 1828—18 
I This has nei eer in this country under the title of “ Blake’s Bot- 
by thu 
ful whether he knew enough of it to distinguish a sedge from a bulrush, or a moss 
from a lichen. Would that this shameless kind of piracy were confined to a 
Solitar : ® 2 : 
