18 



period, whose ^^oik is the first, expressly devoted to 

 plants, of which we have any knowledge, enume- 

 rates somewhat less than five hundred. Three hun- 

 dred years later, or about the time of Cleopatra, 

 Dioscorides notices nearly seven hundred ; and Pli- 

 ny, in the first Christian century, gives an account, 

 collected, as he says, from more than two thousand 

 Greek and Roman writers, of about one thousand 

 species, — the results of the investigations of forty 

 centuries! For fourteen hundred years after Pliny, 

 an increase of only five hundred new species is al- 

 loAved ; but in the next two centuries, when the 

 knowledge of plants was assuming a scientific form, 

 upwards of four thousand five hundred new plants 

 were added to the catalogue ; — a number four times 

 greater than had been ascertained in all the preced- 

 ing ages of the world. So extraordinary was the ad- 

 vance of botany under the auspices of Linnseus, 

 that, in a few years, fifteen hundred other plants 

 were added to the list ; and the whole number, 

 actually described at the time of his death in 1778, 

 was between eleven and twelve thousand. But 

 since that period, the increase has been so pro- 

 digious, that the number of species of all descrip- 

 tions now known, according to an estimate given 

 in a late journal, is not less than one hundred 

 thousand ! 



Such has been the effect of system on Botany — 

 or, at least, such an effect never could have been 

 produced without it. The mere Linnaean nomencla- 

 ture is a gigantic effort, and itself a wonderful in- 



