Introduction. 7 



cation ; it was on philosophic grounds also that he made the 

 characters of the seed and the fruit the basis of his arrange- 

 ment, while the German botanists, paying little attention to the 

 organs of fructification, were chiefly influenced by the general 

 impression produced by the plant, by its habit as the phrase 

 now is. 



The historians of botany have overlooked the real state of 

 the case as here presented, or have not described it with 

 sufficient emphasis ; due attention has not been paid to the 

 fact, that systematic botany, as it began to develope in the 

 xyth century, contained within itself from the first two oppos- 

 ing elements; on the one hand the fact of a natural affinity 

 indistinctly felt, which was brought out by the botanists of 

 Germany and the Netherlands, and on the other the desire, to 

 which Cesalpino first gave expression, of arriving by the path 

 of clear perception at a classification of the vegetable kingdom 

 which should satisfy the understanding. These two elements 

 of systematic investigation were entirely incommensurable ; 

 it was not possible by the use of arbitrary principles of 

 classification which satisfied the understanding to do justice 

 at the same time to the instinctive feeling for natural affinity 

 which would not be argued away. This incommensurability 

 between natural affinity and a. priori grounds of classification 

 is everywhere expressed in the systems embracing the whole 

 vegetable kingdom, which were proposed up to 1736, and 

 which including those of Cesalpino and Linnaeus were not less 

 in number than fifteen. It is the custom to describe these 

 systems, of which those of Cesalpino, Morison, Ray, Bachmann 

 (Rivinus), and Tournefort are the most important, by the one 

 word 'artificial' 1 ; but it was by no means the intention of 

 those men to propose classifications of the vegetable kingdom 

 which should be merely artificial, and do no more than offer an 



1 It will be shown in a later chapter that Linnaeus' sexual system was 

 intended to be artificial. 



