6 INTRODUCTION 



the Cambridge University Press^ it has not seemed necessary on 

 the present occasion to traverse the ground again. 



The reader of The Makers of British Botany will judge, and 

 we think rightly, that Botany has had its ups and downs in this 

 country. At the end of the seventeenth century England was 

 contributing her full share to the foundation and advancement 

 of the subject. In the field of Systematic Botany Ray, at any 

 rate, left his permanent influence as a taxonomist, whilst in 

 Plant Anatomy, the offspring of the newly invented microscope, 

 Grew divided the honours with his brilliant contemporary 

 Malpighi. A few years later Stephen Hales was carrying out 

 the famous experiments which are embodied in his Vegetable 

 Staticks, entitling him to be justly regarded as the Father of 

 plant physiology. Notwithstanding so admirable a beginning, 

 the next century was almost a blank. The essay on John Hill 

 serves to illustrate the sterility of this period. The dominant 

 influence in Botany in the eighteenth century was that of 

 Linnaeus, whose genius as a taxonomist gave the most wonderful 

 impulse to the study of Botany that it has ever received. Shorn 

 of its accumulated dead-weight of nomenclature, the simplified 

 Botany of Linnaeus took deep root in this country and here for 

 a century it reigned supreme as a source of inspiration. Fed on 

 unlimited collections of plants from all parts of a growing 

 Empire, it is hardly surprising that a great British school of 

 Systematic Botany led by Robert Brown, the Hookers, Lindley 

 and Bentham should have arisen. What is remarkable is the 

 almost exclusive persistence of this branch of Botany for more 

 than a generation after the establishment and recognition of 

 other departments on the continent of Europe. Whilst we 

 made a shrine for the Linnaean collections, so far as we were 

 concerned Grew and Hales might never have lived ; even the 

 rational and scientific morphology created by Hofmeister in 

 the forties of last century failed to deflect us from our course ! 



It was only in the later seventies that the New Botany came 

 to England, whither it was imported from Germany. For a 

 while, as was to be expected, our Universities were kept busy 



^ Darwin and Modern Science. 



