CHAP, in.] the Dogma of Constancy of Species. 125 



embryo, had been up to his time called the ' corculum seminis,' 

 especially by Linnaeus and Jussieu ; it was evidently thought 

 that Cesalpino's phraseology was thus retained ; but he, as we 

 have seen, understood by the words ' cor seminis ' the spot where 

 the cotyledons spring from the germ, which spot he wrongly 

 took for the meeting-point of root and stem and the seat of the 

 soul of the plant. And so at last after two hundred years the 

 word disappeared from use, which might have reminded the 

 botanist of Cesalpino's views respecting the soul of plants. 



A work such as Gartner's could scarcely find a fruitful soil 

 in Germany, where some thirty years before even Koelreuter's 

 brilliant investigations had met with little sympathy, and Conrad 

 Sprengel's remarkable enquiries into the relations of the struc- 

 ture of the flower to the insect-world in 1793 failed to be 

 understood ; Gartner complains in the second part, published 

 in 1791, that not two hundred copies of the first volume were 

 sold in three years. But the work, which forms an epoch in 

 the history of botany, was better received in France, where the 

 Academy placed it as second in the list of the productions 

 which in later times had been most profitable to science ; there 

 lived the man who was able to measure the whole value of such 

 a work Antoine Laurent de Jussieu. But even in Germany, 

 where plant-describing was comfortably flourishing, there were 

 not altogether wanting men who knew how to estimate both the 

 services of Gartner and the importance of the natural system. 

 First among these was August Johann Georg Karl Batsch, 

 Professor in Jena from 1761 to 1802, who published in the latter 

 year a ' Tabula affinitatum regni vegetabilis,' with characters 

 of the groups and families. Kurt Sprengel, who was born in 

 1766, and died as Professor of Botany in Halle in 1833, con- 

 tributed still more to the spread of clearer views respecting the 

 real character of the natural system and the task of scientific 

 botany generally by numerous works, and especially by his 

 'Geschichte der Botanik,' which appeared in 1817 and 1818. 

 But even this highly gifted and accomplished man agreed with 



