A VIEW 



OF THE 



NATURAL SYSTEMS OF OKEN, FRIES, AND ENDLICHER. 



" Naturse non imperatur, nisi parendo At qui formas novit, is naturae 



unitatem in dissimillimis coinplectitur." BACON. 



WE may view nature either as a whole, or as a whole subsisting 

 in a multitude of distinct parts. With the former is especially con- 

 cerned the speculative, and with the latter the empirical Natural 

 Science. The speculative science, or the philosophy of nature, 

 seeks to explain this objective generally, and its relation to us, and 

 its ultimate end is also the end of all the researches of naturalists. 

 In these researches we observe a constant tendency to arrive from 

 nature at intelligence, to bring into nature theory. The perfect 

 completion and satisfaction of all this will be found in the subordi- 

 nation of all nature under laws of intelligence ; in the final knowl- 

 edge of that absolute Unity, which comprehends the omniformity 

 of being. 



There is in all natural bodies a tendency to an individual and 

 separate nature ; this individuality is manifest in animals and plants, 

 and is asserted also of minerals, from the definiteness in these last 

 of the proportions of their chemical constituents. It is this which 

 makes the empirical natural science possible, and in individuals and 

 their relations it has its beginning and entire scope. We may from 

 this run through the history of our studies, from general science 

 arriving at botanical, and thence, from past researches, at those to 

 which this essay is devoted. 



The savage becomes acquainted with the animals of his neigh- 

 bourhood, and the trees and herbs which he has found useful or 

 hurtful to him. But his knowledge of them is not science, any 

 more than the similar acquaintance with nature of the unthink- 

 ing man of our own day. It is in the sage, the medicine-man of 

 the savage tribe, that I find the first gleams of the twilight before 

 the dawn of science. He learns some affinities, and perhaps ob- 

 serves some metamorphoses ; and what he has thus gained becomes 

 the ground of the knowledge of others who come after him, until, 

 in some generalizing philosophical mind, science is born. It exists 

 now, in its rudiments, in one thinking mind ; the only necessary 



