767 



following remarks. " The student must be acquainted with the 

 meaning of many technical terms ; he must have his plant in differ- 

 ent states of growth ; he must i^rocure the fruit ; he must examine 

 the interior of that part : in short he must go through a long and care- 

 ful examination, which is entirely independent of the sexual system," 

 Now if the sexual system set out with teaching Botany by intuition, 

 so to speak, and dispensing with either the knowledge of technical 

 terms or the examination of the parts of the plant, this criticism might 

 be just ; but as it does not lay claim to these properties, I am at a loss 

 to conceive its applicability. At the same time with the above. Dr. 

 Lindley goes on to say, " Now I distinctly assert that there is no dif- 

 ficulty in determining the natural orders of plants greater than that 

 of making out the genera by the Linnsean system ; in fact it is the 

 very same thing, only with a different result : in the one case it leads 

 to the mere discovery of a name, in the other to the knowledge of a 

 great number of useful and interesting facts, independent of the name." 

 Now if it be the case that the student must go through the same pro- 

 cess — examine the same jjarts — in the one as in the other system, it 

 will be singular if the amount of knowledge gained is not equal. In 

 fact the examination necessary for the knowing the genus and species 

 of a plant, after you have got at its class and order by the Linnajan 

 system, gives as great an amount of information concerning the plant 

 itself, as if this end were attained by the natural system, with this dif- 

 ference, that the information is far more easily acquired, and the pro- 

 cess not nearly so complicated. 



Botanists of the natural school thus blame the Linnaean system for 

 compelling the student to examine the plant, which examination is 

 the means of his gaining the great amount of information the natural 

 system undertakes to teach, and then assert that the Linnaean student 

 gains nothing but a name ! ! It is a favourite theme of animadversion on 

 the illustrious Swede and his followers, that their system teaches no- 

 thing but names, and deals more in dry distinctions than in facts 

 which lead to our more perfect knowledge of the subject: we will 

 not retort on such critics that useless verbosities and aimless specu- 

 lations constitute the main foundations of their system. That the 

 beautiful precision introduced into a previously chaotic science by the 

 master mind of Linnaeus, had, when it fell into the hands of men of 

 contracted minds, the effect of limiting the science more to the study 

 of distinctions and of names than of facts and history, is not to be 

 denied : but this is not the legitimate result of the Linnaean system ; 



