699 



what I have written, to condemn what is erroneous, and to cherish, 

 and acknowledge, and propagate what is true. Entertaining these 

 views, I make no apology for introducing my ideas of the System of 

 Nature to the readers of the ' Phy tologist. ' 



The present era in botanical science is marked by the severity with 

 which methods have been analyzed and tested : we seem to have ar- 

 rived at a period when nothing that is old and faulty can stand. The 

 sexual method of Linneus is an instance of this ; nothing could be 

 more ingenious, more obvious, more triumphant, or at the same time 

 more artificial. Day by day it is losing ground as a method, although 

 the services of its details can never be dispensed with. Every system 

 of organs, every series offunctions, is now rigidly investigated, and the 

 microscope is perpetually called in, to render the result more complete. 

 Now it is very desirable to bear in mind that the views I promulged 

 respecting System as regards the Animal Kingdom, are mainly depen- 

 dant on the laborious researches of Cuvier, GeofFroy St. Hilaire, and 

 Owen: without the dissecting knife and microscope, without the rigid 

 investigations of the anatomists, no human efforts could ever reach the 

 truth : and so in the Vegetable Kingdom, it is the patient and labori- 

 ous physiologist who must supply the clew to the true system. 



Whatever may be said of the respective merits of the methods of 

 Linneus and Jussieu, I believe the feeling is universal, that these me- 

 thods owe their merits entirely to their respective authors. The 

 terms natural and artificial^ erroneously applied to them, has misled 

 many superficial writers, and some have even been stolid enough to 

 assert that Linneus, in speaking of a natural system, made a prophetic 

 allusion to the method of Jussieu. 



I shall take no pains to enforce the existence of a really natural 

 system : it is to me so self-evident a fact, that T waive the inquiry as al- 

 together superfluous. And assuming this, I also deny to man the 

 power of erecting one. Thus supposing a Ray, a Jussieu or a 

 De Candolle to excel in the perception of character, and, by great 

 discrimination, to succeed informing a series in which species shall fol- 

 low each other in what appears orderly succession : the great merit 

 of these philosophers still consists in having, by means of their know- 

 ledge and discrimination, obtained some idea, more or less precise as 

 the case may be, of that universal scheme which is preexistent to hu- 

 man knowledge and independent of human genius. Thus by a strange 

 iuvertion of what we are too apt to consider retributive justice, the 

 more nearly human intellect can attain to the enunciation of Nature's 

 laws as regards system, the further it recedes from that ardently 



