XXll INTRODUCTION. 



great botanist, not only indirectly, but from his per- 

 sonal research into the nature of monstrosities, did 

 more than any of his predecessors to rescue them from 

 the utter disregard, or at best the contemptuous indif- 

 ference, of the majority of botanists. De Candolle gave 

 a special impetus to morphology in general by giving in 

 his adhesion to the morphological hypotheses of Goethe. 

 These were no mere figments of the poet's imagination, 

 as they were to a large extent based on the actual 

 investigation of normal and abnormal organisation by 

 Goethe both alone, and also in conjunction with Batsch 

 and Jaeger. 



De Candolle's example was contagious. Scarcely a 

 botanist of any eminence since his time but has con- 

 tributed his quota to the records of vegetable teratology, 

 in proof of which the names of Humboldt, Kobert 

 Brown, the De Jussieus, the Saint Hilaires, of Moquin- 

 Tandon, of Lindley, and many others, not to mention 

 botanists still living, may be cited. To students and 

 amateurs the subject seems always to have presented 

 special attractions, probably from the singularity of the 

 appearances presented, and from the fact that in many 

 cases the examination of individual instances of mal- 

 formation can be carried on, to a large extent, without 

 the lengthened or continuous investigation and critical 

 comparative study required by other departments of 

 botanical science. Be this as it may, teratology owes 

 a very largo number of its records to this class of 

 observers. 



While the number of scattered papers on vegetable 

 teratology in various European languages is so great 

 as to preclude the possibility of collating them all, 

 there is no general treatise on the subject in the 



