66 Artificial Systems and Terminology of Organs [Book i. 



and another worth consulting in Michel Adanson's 'Histoire de 

 la Botanique' (Paris, 1864). It is sufficient for our present 

 purpose to consider more particularly the labours of the four 

 men whose names have recently been mentioned. 



Robert Morison 1 , who was born in Aberdeen in 1620 and 

 died in London in 1683, was the first after Cesalpino and 

 Bauhin who devoted himself to systematic botany, that is, to 

 founding and perfecting the classification of plants. He was 

 reproached by his contemporaries and successors with having 

 borrowed without acknowledgment from Cesalpino; this was 

 an exaggeration. Morison commenced his efforts as a syste- 

 matist with a careful examination of Kaspar Bauhin's ' Pinax ' ; 

 there he obtained his conceptions of natural relationship in 

 plants ; and if he afterwards founded his own system more 

 peculiarly on the forms of the fruit, it was in a very different 

 way from that adopted by Cesalpino. Linnaeus answers the 

 reproach above-mentioned by the pertinent remark, that 

 Morison departs as far from Cesalpino in this point as he is 

 inferior to him in the purity of his method. In the year 1669 

 appeared a work with the characteristic title, ' Hallucinationes 

 Kaspari Bauhini in Pinace turn in digerendis quam denomi- 

 nandis plantis,' which Haller justly calls an ' invidiosum opus ' ; 

 for as there are writers at all times who ungratefully accept all 

 that is good and weighty in their predecessors as self-evident, 

 while they point with malicious pleasure to every little mistake 

 which the originator of a great idea may commit, so Morison 

 has no word of recognition for the great and obvious merits of 

 the ' Pinax,' though such a recognition was specially due from 

 one whose design was to point out the numerous mistakes in 

 that work on the subject of affinities. Kurt Sprengel in his 



1 Morison served in the royal army against Cromwell, and after the 

 defeat of his party retired to Paris, where he studied botany under Robin. 

 He was made physician to Charles II and Professor of Botany in 1660, and 

 Professor of the same faculty in Oxford ten years later. See Sprengel, ' Ge- 

 schichte der Botanik,' ii. p. 30. 



