BOTANY AT THE END OF THE 18TH CENTURY 109 



when, but not until, the conditions for further expansion shall 

 have been fulfilled. 



At the beginning of the nineteenth century the time was ripe 

 for such an addition of new territory to the regions of Botany 

 already occupied at that period. In England, at any rate, the 

 work inaugurated by Ray and others had become overshadowed 

 by the authority of Linnaeus, and even on the Continent the 

 effective advance of the science was for various reasons almost 

 stayed. It is true that in France the Jussieus had started advance 

 on fruitful lines, and others like De Candolle were endeavouring 

 to feel their way through the maze of dimly comprehended 

 relationships, but their efforts were obscured by the growing 

 and fatal facilities for piling up mere catalogues of plants 

 without the clues necessary to direct their energies into more 

 profitable channels. As regards the flowering plants, there was, 

 it is true, a groping after a partially perceived natural system, 

 but the lower ranks of the vegetable kingdom formed, so far as 

 scientific purposes were concerned, a terra incognita^ and the 

 attempts to elucidate the morphology of these groups in the light 

 of the angiosperms were, as we now can see clearly enough, 

 plainly foredoomed to failure. 



Facts were distorted and observations misinterpreted in ways 

 that now seem to us almost to smack of sheer perversity, but we 

 must not forget that the methods which in later years have 

 proved so effective had not then been recognised ; Hofmeister, 

 with his marvellous genius, had not as yet arisen to shew the 

 way through the maze of the lower forms. 



But what does strike one as astonishing, or might do so if the 

 circumstance were not still so common, is the evidence of the 

 difficulty men experienced in really seeing things as they were, 

 and of distinguishing the fundamentally important from the 

 trivial or even irrelevant. 



As always, what was needed was the man who could fix 

 his gaze on facts, who would spare no pains to find out what 

 was true, and thus succeed in discovering a sure base to serve 

 as a vantage ground for further advance. Von Mohl was one of 

 these, and earlier in the century there was the man, the subject 

 of this lecture, who by his single-hearted search after truth, and 



