Chap, in.] the Dogma of Constancy of Species. 123 



Linnaeus' scholastic bias, he addressed himself to the examin- 

 ation of the most difficult organs of plants with as great freedom 

 from prepossessions as exact acquaintance with the writings of 

 others ; he gives us the impression of a modern man of science 

 more than any other botanist of the 18th century, with the 

 exception of Koelreuter. He knew how to communicate with 

 clearness of language and perspicuity of arrangement whatever 

 he gathered of general importance from each investigation. 

 Though it is easy to see that the founding of the natural 

 system was ever before his mind as the final object of his 

 protracted labours, he was in no eager haste to reach it ; he 

 contented himself with arranging his fruits, saying expressly 

 that the natural system would never be founded by these 

 means alone, though the exact knowledge of fruits and seeds 

 supplied the most important means for decision. Thus 

 his great work was at once an inexhaustible mine of single 

 well-ascertained facts, and a guide to the morphology of the 

 organs of fructification and to its application to systematic 

 botany. The imperfections, which are to be found even in 

 this work, are due to the circumstances of the time ; in spite 

 of Schmiedel's and Hedwig's researches into the Mosses there 

 was still the old obscurity with regard to the organs of pro- 

 pagation in the Cryptogams, and this rendered a right defini- 

 tion of the ideas, seed and fruit, extremely difficult. But 

 Gartner made one great step in advance on this very point 

 when he showed that the spores of the Cryptogams were 

 essentially different from the seeds of Phanerogams, with 

 which they had been hitherto compared, because they contain 

 no embryo ; he called them therefore not seeds, but gemmae. 

 The second great hindrance to a true conception of certain 

 characters in fruits and seeds on the part of Gartner was the 

 entire ignorance of the history of development which then 

 reigned ; yet even here we see an advance, if only a small one, 

 made by him in his repeatedly going back to the young state 

 for a more correct idea of the organs. 



