BOTANICAL CLASSIFICATION. 333 



Leipsic, in a wholly artificial classification founded on the corolla. 

 His contemporary in England, Robert Morison, somewhat earlier 

 began the publication of his great work, the Universal History 

 of Plants. In this was first attempted a grouping of plants into 

 what are now called natural orders ; and these were defined, some- 

 what loosely, some by their fruit, inflorescence, and flowers, others 

 by their stems, the nature of their juice, &c. But the two great 

 systematists of the time, who together laid the foundations of 

 modern scientific botany, were John Ray in England and Joseph 

 Pitton de Tournefort in France. 



669. Ray's method of classification was sketched in 1682, and 

 was anterior to Tournefort's, but was amended and completed in 

 1703. The leading fault of both was the primary division into 

 trees and herbs. The great merit of Ray was his division of 

 herbs into Flowerless and Flowering, and the latter into Dicotyle- 

 donous and Monocotyledonous. These great classes he divided 

 and subdivided, by characters taken from the organs of fructi- 

 fication, into what we should call natural orders or families, but 

 which he unfortunately called genera. He noted the coincidence 

 of nerved leaves with the monocotyledonous embryo, although 

 he did not notice that his first division of arborescent plants was 

 monocotyledonous ; and he had a clear apprehension of genera. 



670. Tournefort's method was published in French in the 

 year 1694, in Latin in 1700. It is more definite but more arti- 

 ficial than that of Ray, being founded like that of Rivinus almost 

 wholly upon modifications of the corolla, and it overlooked the dis- 

 tinction between monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous embryos. 

 Its great merit is that here genera, as we now understand them, 

 are first established and defined, and all the species then known 

 referred to them ; so that Tournefort was justly said by Linnaeus 

 to be the founder of genera. Ray may be said to have indicated 

 the primary classes, Jussieu (in the next century) to have estab- 

 lished natural orders, and Tournefort to have given to botany 

 the first Genera Plantarum. 



671. Linnaean Classification. Linnaeus, the great reformer of 

 botany in the eighteenth century, thoroughly revised the principles 

 of classification, established genera and species upon a more scien- 

 tific basis, and, in designating species by a word instead of a 

 descriptive phrase, introduced binomial nomenclature. (704.) 

 He likewise established for the stamens, and indeed for the 

 pistils also, their supreme importance in classification (probably 

 without knowledge of the clear suggestion to this effect made 

 by Burckhard in a letter to Leibnitz, printed in 1702) ; their 

 functions, so long overlooked, being now ascertained. He also 



