646 TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 



flowers of most exquisite tint and form; and never more reverently did I 

 quote Wordsworth's lines that tell us, " Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when 

 we stoop than when we soar." 



When we walk through a garden of any magnitude we are surrounded 

 with such a multitude and variety of growths as to be almost oppressed 

 with those riches, and we find it hard to classify them under one dominant 

 law. The lichens and mosses, the ferns and funguses, the trailing and 

 climbing vines; the flowers of all hues and forms, the esculent plants so 

 various, some ripening their fruit under ground and others lifting it into 

 the air and light; the clover and the grasses, the trees deciduous and ever- 

 green, of all sizes and shapes, from the low juniper to the soaring elm — 

 what a world is thus set before us I and how shall we bring all this motley 

 crowd of growths to any sort of order, and arrange them under any satis- 

 factory system ? This question has not only perplexed simple observers of 

 nature like ourselves, but even the shrewd masters of botanic gardens; and 

 it is still not wholly clear by what marks plants are to be classified. It is 

 still the ruling habit of popular speech to classify plants under the heads 

 of trees, shrubs and herbs, according to their mere size. But careful 

 observation shows the folly of this arrangement, by showing that plants 

 of the most various dimensions belong to the same organic family; the 

 bamboo, thirty feet high, being a kind of grass, and the lowly hearts-tongue 

 being of the same general division as the great tree-ferns that rival tho 

 palm. But, when the error of this superficial system was seen, it took 

 years for naturalists to hit upon the true criterion. The system of Rivinus, 

 in 1690, was based upon the formation of the corolla or circlet of flower- 

 leaves. The system of Kamel, in 1693, depended upon the characteristics 

 of the fruit alone, while Magnol, in 1720, look'ed to the calyx or outer 

 envelope, as well as to the corolla; and at last Linnseus, in 1731, drew his 

 system from the variations in the stamens and pistils or the reproductive 

 organs of the floAver. We were brought up to believe in this last system, and 

 some of us remember well how we used to plod over its pedantic terms, 

 and write them again and again from set copy in our writing-bocks at 

 school. Before Linnteus, however, a sagacious Englishman, Ray, had a 

 glimpse of the better science of vegetation, and in 1703 had grouped plants 

 either as flowerless or flowering, and had subdivided the flowering into 

 dicotyledons and monocotyledons, according as the germ is nourished by 

 two or one seed-lobe. The idea of Ray waited for its complete develop- 

 ment till the time of Jussieu, who presented the first principles of his nat- 

 ural system to the French Academy of Sciences in 1773, and finished his 

 great exposition of this system in 1789, eleven years after its commence-- 

 ment. His system, with some modifications, now prevails, and plants are 

 divided into the asexual or flowerless and the sexual or flowering. With- 

 out puzzling our readers with learned terms, it is better to take them out 

 into the garden and teach them how to see for themselves the leading char- 

 acteristics of plants. Consider, first, such as are asexual or flowerless. 

 These are of two kinds: first, those that have stems and leaves undistin- 

 guishable, such as the sea-weed, the fungus, the lichen; secondly, those 

 that have leaves and stems distinguisliable, such as ferns and mosses. 

 There can be no dijQdculty in understanding at once these two classes of 



