ITS FLORA. 31 



external conditions, or to tell us that under these influences 

 the one form is but a modification and development of the 

 other. Even could we establish this fact, and determine 

 the order of its occurrence, it would be no solution of the 

 great primal question of diversity, seeing that plant-life is 

 altogether passive, and that external conditions are of them- 

 selves utterly impotent without a higher power to sustain, 

 and an intellect to direct and control, the course of their 

 operations. And, after all, it is less the mere matter of 

 diversity than the plan which connects this diversity into 

 one harmonious system ; less the apparent order which 

 may be learned than the reason thereof, to which human 

 knowledge may never attain. God has thought fit so to 

 evoke the vegetable kingdom to invest His works with 

 variety and complexity ; and to unravel this complexity, 

 to arrange these various plants according to their kind and 

 character, to classify them, in accordance with the divine 

 design, into species and genera and orders, and to learn 

 their functions and relations, is the task of the student of 

 Nature. Proceeding upon this plan, the botanist arranges 

 plants according to the complexity of their organs, attempt- 

 ing to separate the simpler from the more highly organised, 

 and these again one from another according to certain dis- 

 similarities and differences of form and function. His aim 

 is to discover the creative idea that pervades the vegetable 

 kingdom ; and the nearer he approaches that conception, 

 the more intelligible and permanent his so-called "systems" 

 of arrangement. 



In attempting this arrangement numerous, varied, and 

 complex as vegetable life may at first sight appear the 

 botanist has happily a few great fixed principles in nature 

 to guide him. Type and Order run unswervingly through- 

 out the whole ; and though the Creator might easily have 

 constructed each species after its own type, and rendered 



