LESSON 33.] NATURAL SYSTEM. 195 



LESSON XXXIII. 



BOTANICAL SYSTEMS. 



568. Natural System. The System of Botany consists of the orders 

 or families, duly arranged under their classes, and having the tribes, 

 the genera, and the species arranged in them according to their re- 

 lationships. This, when properly carried out, is the Natural System ; 

 because it is intended to express, as well as we are able, the various 

 degrees of relationship among plants, as presented in nature ; to 

 rank those species, those genera, &c. next to each other in the classi- 

 fication which are really most alike in all respects, or, in other words, 

 which are constructed most nearly on the same particular plan. 



569. Now this word plan of course supposes a planner, an in- 

 telligent mind working according to a system : it is this system, 

 therefore, which the botanist is endeavoring as far as he can to 

 exhibit in a classification. In it we humbly attempt to learn some- 

 thing of the plan of the Creator in this department of Nature. 



570. So there can be only one natural system of Botany, if by the 

 term we mean the plan according to which the vegetable creation 

 was called into being, with all its grades and diversities among the 

 species, as well of past as of the present time. But there may be 

 many natural systems, if we mean the attempts of men to interpret 

 and express the plan of the vegetable creation, systems which will 

 vary with our advancing knowledge, and with the judgment and 

 skill of different botanists, and which must all be very imperfect. 

 They will all bear the impress of individual minds, and be shaped 

 by the current philosophy of the age. But the endeavor always is 

 to make the classification a reflection of Nature, as far as any system 

 can be which has to be expressed in a series of definite propositions, 

 and have its divisions and subdivisions following each other in some 

 single fixed order.* 



* The best classification must fail to give more than an imperfect and con- 

 siderably distorted reflection, not merely of the plan of creation, but even of our 

 knowledge of it. It is often obliged to make arbitrary divisions where Nature 

 shows only transitions, and to consider genera, &c. as equal units, or groups of 

 equally related species, while in fact they may be very unequal, to assume, on 



