SYSTEMS OF TAXONOMY 95 



" Facile botanicorum princeps ; Britanniae gloria et 

 ornamentum." 



During the first decades of the nineteenth century 

 quite a number of attempts were made to classify plants 

 on what were believed by their authors to be sound 

 natural principles, but none of these were successful in 

 displacing the De Jussieu-De Candolle system. Endlicher, 

 about 1836, put forward a scheme based on totally 

 erroneous ideas as to the modes of growth of different 

 types of plant life, a scheme which very soon died a 

 natural death. Similarly Brongniart, whose work in 

 another department of the science I shall have to speak 

 of by and by, divided plants principally into Cryptogams 

 and Phanerogams, including under the latter Gymno- 

 sperms, Monocotyledons, and Dicotyledons. He prefixed 

 a group, Agames, in which he placed Algae, Fungi, and 

 Lichens, whose sexual organs were at that time, with 

 very few exceptions, practically unknown. On the 

 whole the classification, which appeared in 1828, was an 

 advance on those then before the botanical public, and 

 possessed the merit of placing the Gymnosperms in a 

 class apart from the Dicotyledons, with which some 

 botanists long after Brongniart's day persisted in classing 

 them. 



Lindley was another systematist who flourished in 

 the early years of the nineteenth century. He was 

 largely instrumental in preserving the Royal Gardens at 

 Kew as a national institution when Parliament proposed 

 to abolish them altogether. His services to horticulture 

 were many and important ; indeed, in the words of the 

 President of the Royal Society when presenting Lindley 

 with the Royal Medal, " he raised horticulture from the 

 condition of an empirical art to that of a developed 

 science." His most important work, The Vegetable 

 Kingdom, was published in 1846, and in it he formulated 

 the last of several schemes suggested by him. How far 

 it was likely to succeed may be judged by the fact that 



