T 90 Morphology and Systematic Botany under [BOOK i. 



another name ; that it is superfluous to present the history of 

 development as a ' maxim ' in Kant's use of the word, instead 

 of showing that the history of development enters naturally and 

 of itself into inductive investigation, and so on. All this will 

 not lessen the historical importance of this philosophic intro- 

 duction ; the traditional way in which descriptive botany was 

 at that time presented to the student was so thoroughly dog- 

 matic and scholastic, trivial and uncritical, that it was necessary 

 to impress upon him in many words, that this is not the 

 method of true investigation of nature. 



Passing on to the more special problems of botanical en- 

 quiry, Schleiden next dwells on the history of development as 

 the foundation of all insight into morphology, though he over- 

 shot the mark when he rejected as unfruitful the simple com- 

 parative method, which had produced considerable results in 

 the hands of De Candolle, and was virtually the fruitful ele- 

 ment in the doctrine of phyllotaxis of Schimper and Braun. 

 Still he took an active part himself in the study of development 

 in plants, and gave special prominence to embryology ; he also 

 discussed the doctrine of metamorphosis from the point of 

 view of the history of development, and pointed to Caspar 

 Friedrich Wolff's treatment of that subject as much clearer 

 than that which had been introduced by Goethe. Finally, 

 Schleiden's mode of dealing with the natural system must be 

 reckoned among the good services which he rendered to 

 method ; not because his classification of the vegetable king- 

 dom presents any specially interesting features or brought to 

 light any new affinities, but because we see an attempt made 

 for the first time to give detailed characters drawn from mor- 

 phology and the history of development to the primary divi- 

 sions, and because by this means the positive and distinct 

 nature of the Cryptogams was from the first clearly brought 

 out. The old way of treating morphology, as though there 

 were only Phanerogams in the world, and then having recourse 

 to unmeaning negatives in dealing with the Cryptogams, was 



