732 IICTURE LVIII. 



fungi or mushrooms, fill up its extensive departments; some have also sepa- * 

 rated a part of the algae under the name of hepaticae, or gelatinous weeds. 

 In this class the fructifications are extremely various; some of the fuci and 

 confervae approach so much in their general- appearance and mode of growth 

 to corallines and zoophytes, that they seem to form an obvious connexion 

 between the lowest ranks of the vegetable and animal kingdoms; Avhile other 

 plants of the class are scarcely distinguishable by their appearance from some 

 of the productions of the mineral kingdom. 



The French have introduced into very general use the botanical system of 

 Jussieu. The most prominent feature in this system is the division of all the 

 genera into a hundred natural orders, which are also arranged in fifteen 

 classes. Jussieu begins, like Linne, with the separation of cryptogamic from 

 phanerogamic plants; the seeds of the cryptogamic plants, which form the 

 first class, being without cotyledons or seed leaves, and all other plants being 

 distinguished into such as have seeds with one and with two cotyledons. 

 Accordingly as the stamina or filaments are inserted below the pistil, on the 

 calyx, or on the seed vessel, the first description of seeds affords three dis- 

 tinct classes. The plants which have two cotyledons follow, and are divided 

 into apetalous, monopetalous, and polypetalous, from distinctions respect- 

 ing the corolla or flower leaves, which are somewhat arbitrarily understood; 

 and lastly diclinous, from the separation of the stamina and pistils. The 

 three first of these divisions are subdivided according to the insertion of the 

 stamina, and the union or separation of the antherae, which they support, into 

 ten classes, making, with the four already mentioned, fourteen, to which the 

 diclinous plants add a fifteenth. The orders are determined without any 

 particular limitation of the parts from which the characters are taken. This 

 system is of acknowledged merit as a philosophical classification of the natu- 

 ral orders of plants; such vegetables as nearly agree in their habits and ap- 

 pearances being brought more uniformly together than in the system of 

 Linne. Hence, in the arrangement of a botanical garden, or in a treatise on the 

 chemical or medical properties of plants, it might be employed with advan- 

 tage: but for the practical purposes of botanical investigation it appears to be 

 utterly unfit, since its author has sacrificed all logical and systematical laws 

 to the attempt to follow nature, in analogies, which are often discoverable only 

 with great difficulty, and which are seldom reducible to methodical defini- 

 tions. 



