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What a " combination of disjointed things " — nay, not only " dis- 

 jointed," but a system affected with fragilitas ossium, where every 

 bone is broken, and nothing to be seen but here a fragment and there 

 a fragment, a Httle of everything and nothing complete! Can such a 

 dismembered system, such a collection of debris, be of any real prac- 

 tical use ? I should say no ! 



Dr. Ayres considers my quotation from Dr. Lindley as "not suffi- 

 ciently ample." I confess I do not well understand the two senses in 

 which a group may be " natural." Dr. A. says " he (Dr. Lindley) im- 

 plies that Nature has not indeed created species, orders, genera, or 

 other groups, as such, but has imprinted such characters and affinities 

 on plants as enables us to throw them into groups approximating 

 more or less to the scheme of Nature, and in that sense natural." Now 

 this distinction is somewhat too nice for my organs of discrimination : 

 if Nature has indeed formed such a chain of characters and affinities, 

 then we must say that she has formed the groups which are the tan- 

 gible representatives of these characters. We cannot say that Nature 

 has created a name, as a genus or an order, but if she has created the 

 thing we represent and understand by the name, where is the differ- 

 ence ? The word species implies a congeries of individuals having 

 certain common peculiarities and distinctions; and when we say "Na- 

 ture creates species," we mean that she creates individuals having the 

 properties which we attribute to the abstraction — species. 



Dr. Ayres wishes to establish the existence of a plan of Nature by 

 asserting that plants possess certain " gradations of affinity," and are 

 connected with each other by " oscillatory groups." It has not been 

 my good fortune to fall in with these regular " gradations of affini- 

 ties ; " and as to " oscillatory groups," the system generally seems af- 

 fected with a continual "oscillation," and to be never at rest ; for, says 

 Dr. Lindley, "the natural orders seldom follow in the same manner in 

 the arrangements of two different botanists." The existence of regu- 

 lar and connected " gradations of affinity " is just the point I dispute, 

 for I conceive they have, in most instances, their behig rather in ima- 

 gination than in fact, and a group is dubbed " natural," and its " affi- 

 nities " and " transitions " marked out with unerring accuracy forth- 

 with, in which state it remains for perhaps six months, till some other 

 botanist conceives its position " unnatural," and transfers it to some 

 other place, from thence, in turn, to be removed. If the high-flown 

 pretensions of the natural school were realized, and every genus and 

 every species, from the highest to the lowest type of vegetable life had 

 its true place in the scale of being assigned to it, then indeed we 



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