CLASSIFICATION. 



57 



by some the sexual parts of Mosses, he adopted the " male" 

 flowers for the subdivision of his classes, as these were found 

 in the form of a disc, knob, or bud. These " male" flowers, 

 we have seen, are observable by the naked eye in but com- 

 paratively few Mosses ; and British botanists — we refer espe- 

 cially to the system of Hooker — have rejected subdivisions 

 founded on their position and structure, as adopted by 

 Hedwig and succeeding continental botanists ; judging that 

 the capsule and its parts were quite sufficient for distin- 

 guishing the several orders and genera. 



Bridel, a German botanist, pubHshed in 1819 his ' Me- 

 thodus nova Muscorum,^ an ingenious system, founded also 

 on the structure of the capsule and portions of the peri- 

 stome. The principal objection to it is the minute way in 

 which it is subdivided, and encumbered with hard Greek 

 names, involving a task on the memory wliich a musco- 

 logist nowadays can ill afford to submit to. His ' Bryo- 

 logia' however displays great labour and research, and 

 those who have studied his works much more minutely than 

 the author of this volume, say that these, " though full of 

 the strangest'; errors as to species and synonyms, contain 

 a history of the science, and a review of whatever is con- 

 nected with it, at once admirable and unrivalled." 



