Pjiilosophy of Botany. 223 



of plants would reach beyond its practical usefulness. lie 

 desired to establish still another system, which would group 

 together those plants which resemble another the most, or 

 Avhich are, as he explained himself, the nearest related. Such 

 a system he declared to be the natural system, and the con- 

 struction of such a one the highest and ultimate problem of 

 botany. But the time and means for its accomplishment were 

 not at L.inn<^'s disposition. It was reserved for a more genial 

 clime, and a people endowed with taste in horticulture, to de- 

 velop this idea. 



Bernard Jussieu, then director of the Jardine des Plantes in 

 Paris, had designed a system arranged on affinity, according 

 to the natural relationships, based upon investigations made 

 in the garden of Trianone, near Versailles, which belonged to 

 Madam Pompadour, a friend and patron of science. 



His nephew. Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, a man of very im- 

 pressible and imaginative mind, and profound learning, soon 

 after became the author of the natural system. This sys- 

 tematic tendency which seeks its principal object in the de- 

 scription and arrangement of plants, while it increased 

 immensely our knowledge of the forms of plants, yet while 

 thus occupied with the external differences, lost sight of those 

 qualities which constitute her a living organism. There is 

 surely a fascinating charm in the aspect of the thousandfold 

 mixture in the crowded mass of flowers, which is so well ex- 

 pressed in the confession of Jean Jacques Rousseau, " Tant 

 que j'herborise, je ne suis pas malheureux; " and this attraction 

 is not even absent in the dried plants of the herbaria. It is 

 attributable to this fact, that such a one-sided tendency as the 

 one followed so long a time by the old Linnsean school was 

 kept up for many decades by a great number of practical bot- 

 anists. Up to this day thrives, especially in England, the tribe 

 of root diggers and herbalists over which already Theophras- 

 tus, two thousand years ago, made merry. 



While thus amongst the followers of Linn^ the study of 

 botany had become somehow encrusted, and apparently 

 temporarily arrested, a rise had taken place long ago in En- 

 gland. The experimentative method had revived and ani- 

 mated the other natural sciences. Frances Bacon, the Lord 



