XC11 INTRODUCTION. 



most useful and best known a jealous 

 specific partiality. 



But while this occupied the forefront of 

 the herborising mind, there was already 

 in its remoter depths a vague nebulous in- 

 ceptive process of association as if for 

 Genera to be some future day tested and 

 denned ; the hidden embryo beginnings of 

 that framework by which a classificatory 

 science stands upright ; as LinnaBus after- 

 wards said Botanica innititur fixis Gene- 

 ribus. This process had its two poles. On 

 the one hand there was the opening human 

 mind with its inward need of system, and 

 on the other hand there was the real and 

 visible though yet untraced system of na- 

 ture to call it out, and something of this 

 system of nature had already stamped itself 

 dimly on the old nomenclature that had to 

 be translated. Thus a twofold cause con- 

 spired to give the English names a specific 

 and a generic element, which must not 

 indeed be made too much of as if it were 

 quite identical with the ripe scientific idea, 

 but which all the same deserves to be j 

 acknowledged as being, however rudi- 



