76 HISTORY OF BOTANY 



The Endogens are still " phanerogamic " with obvious 

 flowers, or " cryptogamic " without apparent flowers, 

 and along with such plants as Naiadaceae he groups the 

 whole of the Vascular Cryptogams. 



Apart from the fact that De Candolle's scheme is 

 in many respects followed even yet in our modern floras — 

 as, for instance, the subdivision of "Exogens" into Di- 

 and Monochlamydeae and the further subdivision of the 

 former into thalami-, calyci-, and corolU-florae — the system 

 stood out as a protest against Linnaeus's artificial taxo- 

 nomy, that found so much favour among the botanists 

 of the early years of the nineteenth century, especially 

 on the Continent. Unsatisfactory as it was from our 

 point of view, it yet formed the starting-point of the 

 improved scheme put forward by Bentham and Hooker, 

 pubhshed more than fifty years after. (I will refer to his 

 share in the great Prodromus later on.) 



Beyond the general morphological principles laid 

 down by A. P. ^(Je Candolle in his Theorie ^Umentaire, 

 nothing of any irnportance was added to our knowledge 

 of the external morphology of plants during the first 

 twenty years of the century. Considerable attention 

 was, however, directed to internal structure, and many 

 of the errors and misconceptions of Grew and Malpighi 

 were corrected or removed. This was due no doubt, in 

 the first instance, to the gradual improvements that were 

 being introduced into the mechanism of the microscope, 

 and also in large measure to the very considerable increase 

 in the numbers of those who were attracted to anatomical 

 studies and to the keen rivalry existing among them. 

 This rivalry was accentuated by the offer of the Royal 

 Society of Gottingen, in 1804, of a prize for the best essay 

 on certain disputed points in plant histology. Three 

 competitors entered for the prize, Rudolphi, Link, and 

 Treviranus. It would serve no useful purpose to recount 

 the views expressed in these three essays, or to de- 

 scribe the results arrived at by Bemhardi, who wrote 



