146 Development of the Natural System under [BOOK i. 



these great divisions of the whole vegetable kingdom was 

 far from being rightly understood. It was usage rather 

 than anything else, which gradually put them forward as 

 primary types; in the systems themselves some received too 

 great, others too little prominence, or other groups of doubtful 

 character were admitted alongside of them. Bartling, for 

 instance, whose system up to 1850 or even longer may rank as 

 one of the most natural, adheres to De Candolle's division of 

 the vegetable kingdom into cellular and vascular plants, and 

 rightly divides the former into two main groups, Thallophytes 

 and Muscineae (Homonemeae and Heteronemeae), while he 

 separates the latter into Vascular Cryptogams and Phanero- 

 gams ; but the Phanerogams are divided into Monocotyledons 

 and Dicotyledons, which again are distributed into four groups, 

 one of these being characterised by the presence of a vitellus, 

 that is, of an endosperm surrounded by a perisperm, a 

 thoroughly artificial division. The three other divisions are 

 named apetalous, monopetalous, and polypetalous, but the 

 Coniferae and Cycadeae are placed in the apetalous division. 

 Less satisfactory is the primary division into Thallophytes and 

 Cormophytes proposed by ENDLiCHER 1 , the latter separating 

 into the divisions Acrobrya (Muscineae, Vascular Cryptogams, 



1 Stephen Ladislaus Endlicher was born at Pressburg in 1805, and 

 abandoning the study of theology became Scriptor in the Imperial Library 

 at Vienna in 1828, and in 1836 Custos of the botanical department of the 

 Imperial Collection of Natural History. Having graduated at the Univer- 

 sity in 1840, he became Professor of Botany and Director of the Botanic 

 Garden. His library and herbarium, valued at 24,000 thalers, he pre- 

 sented to the State, and with his private means founded the Annalen des 

 Wiener-Museums, purchased botanical collections and expensive botanical 

 books, and published his own works and works of other writers. His official 

 salary was small, and having exhausted his resources in these various 

 expenses, he put an end to his own life in March 1 849. Endlicher was not 

 only one of the most eminent systematists of his day, but a philologist also, 

 and a good linguist. He wrote among other things a Chinese grammar, 

 See 'Linnaea,' vol. xxxiii (1864 and 1865), p. 583. 



