296 HOUSE, GARDEN, AND FIELD 



numerous stamens and numerous carpels. Was Ray 

 justified in placing them in the same family with the 

 buttercups ? Linnaeus turned them out again, and put 

 them in the same family as the roses and brambles. When 

 he set up his classes and orders, based largely upon the 

 number of stamens and carpels, the cinquefoils would have 

 come naturally, together with all the buttercups, into 

 his Polyandria Polygynia, but to this he would not consent. 

 Taking advantage of the circumstance that the stamens 

 of the cinquefoils, roses', brambles, &c., spring apparently 

 (not really) from the calyx, he made them into a separate 

 class, which he called Icosandria. Had he any right to do 

 so ? Why was he bent upon keeping them apart from 

 the buttercups ? If we could have put these questions 

 to him, he would have answered, " there are natural 

 groups which we cannot make, but only recognise. Cinque- 

 foils and buttercups belong to distinct natural groups. 

 I see no close affinity between them, and have carefully 

 framed my definitions so as to keep them apart." 

 * This, you will say, is oracular, and gives us no intelligible 

 reason why cinquefoils and buttercups are not to be 

 associated. Linnaeus had his reasons, .but could not 

 perfectly explain them, even to himself. Nevertheless 

 they were sound reasons, as all the later history of botany 

 shows. Many arrangements of flowering plants have been 

 tried since his day, but perhaps no one of them has put 

 the cinquefoils and buttercups together. The modern 

 classifier pictures the families to which they belong as 

 two large islands in an ocean with no land passage from 

 one to the other. Nothing would induce him to re- 

 present the cinquefoils as belonging to the buttercup 

 island. 



If we are agreed as to our groups, it will be easy to find 

 definitions for them. Plants belonging to the Ranunculus 

 family have distinct petals, numerous stamens springing 

 from the top of the flower-stalk, and separate carpels, 

 whether few or many. Plants belonging to the Ranun- 



