

ON SYSTEMS AND CLASSIFICATIONS. 



the natural world, a glimpse of the immediate agency of the 

 Deity, it is in the contemplation of this vital principle, which 

 seems independent of material organization, and an impulse of his 

 own divine energy. 



CHAPTER II. 



ON SYSTEMS AND CLASSIFICATIONS. 



A H E human mind is unable lo take in the various forms of the 

 vegetable kingdom at one view : it must therefore have recourse to 

 some contrivance in order to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge, 

 and to satisfy its curiosity. It attains its object in the most perfect 

 manner when it reduces its knowledge to a system. 



A botanical system is a list of al! the plants hitherto discovered, 

 arranged according to certain characters, and their deviations from 

 them. When a person has mice accustomed himself to some sys- 

 tem, his progress will be doubled, and he will form a much better 

 judgment of plants than he was able to do before. 



There have been men of high abilities who have maintained, that 

 all nature might be reduced to system; tliere have, on the contrary, 

 been other great men who have denied the truth of this position, 

 and have rejected all systematic arrangement, or even the least trace 

 of it. Others again, and indeed the greatest number, b lieve that 

 that there is no real system of nature, but that there is a chain of 

 beings. 



Nature connects the most multifarious bodies by their form, size, 

 colours, and qualities, Each individual body, each plant has some 

 affinity with several others, and this goes on to infinity. But who 

 is able to declare the order followed by nature ] All affinities and 

 natural arrangements are but apparent traces of a natural system. 

 By a more accurate investigation, we find those boasted affinities not 

 so great, and the natural arrangements not so luminous. We en- 

 deavour, by our systematic divisions, to arrange bodies in straight 

 lines; but nature forms in the whole an intricate and infinite rarnifi- 



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