122 Development of the Natural System under [BOOK!. 



to the year 1820, and their results appeared in a long series of 

 monographs on different families in the Memoires du Museum. 

 He felt with De Candolle, Robert Brown, and later systematists, 

 that the perfecting of the natural system depended mainly on 

 the careful establishing and defining of families. His efforts 

 received a new impulse from the work of a German writer, 

 whose first volume had appeared in 1788, a year therefore 

 before the 'Genera Plantarum,' a second following it in 1791, 

 and a supplementary volume in 1805. 



This work was JOSEPH GARTNER'S ' ' De fructibus et semini- 

 bus plantarum,' in which the fruits and seeds of more than 

 a thousand species are described and carefully figured. But 

 almost more important than these numerous descriptions, 

 though they offered rich material to the professed systematists, 

 were the introductions to the first two volumes, and especially to 

 those of 1788. They contain valuable reflections on sexuality 

 in plants, a subject which had remained in the condition in 

 which it was left by Camerarius (1694) till it was greatly deve- 

 loped by Koelreuter after 1761, and had since then been little 

 studied, and an account of the morphology of fruits arid seeds, 

 the knowledge of which had gone back rather than advanced 

 since the days of Malpighi and Grew. Gartner was well quali- 

 fied for this work by his unparalleled knowledge of the forms of 

 fruits, and still more by the character of his mind. Free from 



1 Joseph Gartner was born at Calw in Wiirtemberg in 1732, and died in 

 1791. He commenced his studies in Gottingen in 1751, where he was a pupil 

 of Haller. He travelled into Italy, France, Holland, and England in order 

 to make the acquaintance of famous naturalists, and worked also at physics 

 and zoology. In 1 760 he was Professor of Anatomy in Tubingen, and 

 in 1768 became Professor of Botany at St. Petersburg; but finding himself 

 unable to bear the climate, he returned to Calw in 1770, and gave himself 

 up entirely to his book, 'De fructibus et seminibus plantarum,' which he had 

 already commenced. Banks and Thunberg, one of whom had returned from 

 a voyage round the world, the other from Japan, handed over to him the 

 collections of fruits which they had made. His persistent study, partly 

 with the microscope, brought him near to blindness. There is an interest- 

 ing life of Gartner by Chaumeton in the ' Biographic Universelle. 1 



