335 



a passage as this, is, that the writer adopted his opinion from hearsay, 

 without examination of the subject, and indeed the confident asser- 

 tions with regard to the superiority of the natural system and its 

 advantages, though ' false as dicers' oaths,' have been so frequently 

 repeated, that, joined with unmeasured abuse of the Linnaean system, 

 the statements have been received on trust ; and yet it is incompre- 

 hensible how the fabricators of these systems could so deceive them- 

 selves, and not less so, how far they have deceived others. It would 

 be tedious, and I trust unnecessary, to advert farther to the orders of 

 the * Vegetable Kingdom,' and it may suffice to say that the same 

 contradictions characterise the book almost from first to last, and that 

 everything respecting the unanimity of plants in the different orders 

 is as unstable, uncertain, and unsatisfactory, as is the account of their 

 medical virtues," — P. 61. 



This, at all events, is honest and straightforward, as well as tho- 

 roughly consistent with what is said in other parts of the book. But 

 *' Who shall decide when Doctors disagree ?" For our own part we 

 believe the truth, as usual, to lie between the two extremes. Without 

 venturing to assert, with Drs. Lindley and Thomson, that the so-called 

 natural system will do all that is predicated of it, we can by no means 

 allow, with the author of the ' Observations,' that everything con- 

 nected with it is " unstable, uncertain, and unsatisfactory," even in a 

 medical point of view. It is quite true, as our author states at p. 49, 

 that the Linnaean artificial system, of which he is there speaking, does 

 not inculcate what he terms " the en'oneous doctrine, that the plants 

 contained in its classes or orders are in each characterized by similar 

 properties and virtues ;" but then it is equally true, that Linnaeus 

 himself, the framer of that system, a hundred years ago declared that 

 "Plantae, quae Geneve conveniunt, etiam virtute conveniunt; quae Or- 

 dine Naturali continentur, etiam virtute proprius accedunt ; quaeque 

 C^asse natural! congruunt, etiam viribus quodammodo congruunt :"* 

 so that this is by no means a new doctrine. With regard to the orders 

 selected as examples of the very opposite qualities possessed by the 

 plants contained in them, surely the author of the 'Observations,' as a 

 medical man, must be aware that the very same drug, ipecacuanha, 

 for example, exhibits very different effects upon the human frame, ac- 

 cording to the dose in which it is administered. Most of the apparent 

 inconsistencies on this head are reconciled by the passage already 

 cited from DeCandolle, namely, that the same principle which is 



* ' 



Philosophia Botanica,' § 375, p. 278. 



