327 



that here at all events the system is scarcely in fairness open to the 

 charge of a predominance of " uncertainty and discrepancies." 



In another part of the ' Observations ' the author charges a writer 

 in the ' London and Edinburgh Journal,' with " ignorance of Linnaeus 

 or his writings ;". we fear that the following quotation, which is in 

 some measure connected with the subject we have been discussing, 

 will show that our author is himself fairly amenable to the same 

 charge. He says : — 



" I have now given enough to shew that Linnaeus, in his Fragmenta, 

 considered that natural orders (were the hopeless task to be attempted 

 of forming such) ought to be founded on striking or evident external 

 characters ; and this is all I wish to make appear. They were given 

 in the ' Philosophia Botanica' as hints of the way in which natural 

 orders should be formed. They are very imperfect, as he always de- 

 clared ; and some of them contain genera for which no reason can be 

 given why they are located in the place they hold ; but yet he scarcely 

 would have brought together into the same order plants so wholly 

 unlike each other as many we find associated in the systems of the 

 present day : for instance, the snowdrop with the American aloe ; the 

 tulip and lily with butcher's-broom ; the mulberry with the fig ; the 

 castor-oil tree with the box ; chickweed with the gaudy pink and 

 lychnis; the snapdragon and digitalis with the beautiful veronica and 

 globe buddlea ; the honeysuckle with the laurustinus and the elder ; 

 the lime tree with the corchorus ; or the hardy and evergreen ivy with 

 the delicate and lowly moschatel. In an artificial system it matters 

 not how incongruous may be the species included in any class or 

 order; but to find such as the above, and hundreds of others, in sys- 

 tems professing to arrange together such plants as are ' more like to 

 each other than to anything else,' is certainly somewhat of the won- 

 derful."— P. 89. 



The author has been most unfortunate in the selection of examples 

 of what Linnaeus would not have done, since " the immortal Swede " 

 has actually associated in the same order many of the very plants 

 which, according to the preceding extract, " he scarcely would have 

 brought together." For example : in Linnaeus's order Scabridae we 

 find the mulberry and the fig associated with Dorstenia, Urtica, and 

 others which until lately formed the modern order Urticaceae. In his 

 Caryophyllei the chickweed [Alsine] is really placed " with the gaudy 

 pink and lychnis ; " we wonder where else it should be placed ! 

 Then again, in the Linnaean order Personatae, answering to our 

 Scrophulariaceae, the snapdragon and Veronica are included, as they 



