aromatics and gum-bearing plants. Pliny and 
Greeks ; their successors retained the same kind 
of arrangement for ages. A cessation of all philo- 
sophical inquiry into the nature of vegetation en- 
dured about seventeen hundred years, during all 
which time scarcely a single addition was made 
to the stock of knowledge left behind him by 
Theophrastus. But with the revival of letters a 
new direction was given to researches in natural 
history. The woods, the plains, the valleys, the 
ocean and the mountains were investigated with 
an ardor that soon made amends for ancient indif- 
ference. This spirit of inquiry once excited, men 
speedily learned to estimate rightly the greater 
value of facts than of assertion; one discovery 
produced another, and in a few years a new 
foundation was laid of that imperfect but beauti- 
ful science which constitutes modern botany. 
Up to the middle of the seventeenth century 
vegetable physiology had been grounded upon 
observations entirely independent of anatomical 
investigations. But about this time the accurate 
inquiries of two naturalists, John Ray, an Eng- 
lish clergyman, and J oseph Pitton de Tournfort, 
a professor of botany in Paris, who flourished at 
the end of the seventeenth century, and upon 
whose systems the modern arrangement accord- 
ing to natural orders is founded. This, however, 
and all others were for a time eclipsed by another 
better adapted to the circumstances of the times, 
and emanating from a writer who had the cour- 
age and talent to carry reformation into every 
branch of natural history, 
