of Antoinc Laurent T)e Jussieu. 611 



ation, rather than the connecting them with each other in 

 natural groups. Some eminent botanists, however, had 

 partially detected the importance of those characters which 

 were calculated for dividing the vegetable kingdom into 

 great natural classes. Thus Ray since 1682, and Boerhaave 

 in 1710, had recognised the value of the characters furnished 

 by the embryo, and the distinction of monocotyledonous 

 and dicotyledonous plants, though they often applied this 

 principle inaccurately ; but the rest of their classification, 

 though preserving, like all the other systems, a tolerable 

 number of natural groups, is too systematic not to introduce 

 many which are completely artificial. Besides, all the old 

 methods admit the separation of trees and herbs, which 

 frequently destroys all natural relations. 



Linnaeus also, who occasioned so great an advance in botany 

 by the precision which he introduced into this science, from 

 the simplicity of his sexual system, and by his sagacious 

 investigation of the most striking phenomena of vegetable life, 

 ought, according to the prepossession of his numerous 

 disciples, to be looked upon more especially as the leader of 

 a systematic school, though he positively declared that he 

 had directed his utmost efforts at laying the foundations of a 

 natural method, of which he has presented the outline in his 

 Classes Plantarum, in 1738, and a new edition in his Philo- 

 sophia Botanica, in 1750. 



He always esteemed this method above every other, and 

 considered it as the essential object of the science : but it 

 must be owned that, if he first attempted to point out some 

 fragments of it (fragmenta methodi naturalis), as he himself 

 expresses it, these fragments were nevertheless very imperfect 

 in many points ; for, among sixty-seven groups which he has 

 established, only half are tolerably similar to those which 

 have been retained, the others uniting genera belonging to 

 very different families. 



Besides which, he has never pointed out the characters of 

 these groups, nor the principles which had directed him 

 in forming them : we might even believe that it was rather 

 by that natural perception of relations, which a botanist of 

 such penetration must necessarily possess, that he has allowed 

 himself to be directed, than by a profound and comparative, 

 study of the organisation of the different genera which he 

 has associated in each of his groups. We even perceive that 

 no fixed principle guided him in the formation of these 

 different natural orders ; for in some (the Sarmentacea? for 

 example) the dicotyledonous and the monocotyledonous 

 plants are mingled almost in an equal number ; in others, the 



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