30 ; REPORT—1874, 
engaged inthe preliminary labour of a ‘ Genera Plantarum’ he contemplated. 
Monographs also of individual natural orders or large genera which De Can- 
dolle always strongly recommended, not only as the best exercise for young 
botanists, but as the best means of promoting the science for those whose 
circumstances prevented their undertaking more general investigations, were 
in some instances being prepared in England as on the Continent. Hooker, 
Greville, Arnott, and others had devoted special works to Ferns and Mosses ; 
Lindley had made considerable progress with his ‘Genera and Species of 
Orchidez,’ and at his suggestion I had taken up the Labiate. Even for the 
British flora 8. F. Gray’s ‘ Natural Arrangement’ and Lindley’s ‘Synopsis’ 
were intended to bring the natural orders into use by our local botanists ; 
but owing to defects in form and to the want of any artificial Clavis, neither 
of these works was calculated to overcome the prejudices then prevailing in 
favour of the Linnean classes. 
In Germany the progress had been slower. The country abounds in those 
plodding minds which revel in the working out minutie of detail, and, to find 
their way, are satisfied with a sexual, alphabetical, or any other artificial 
index, as well as in pure speculators, who, in developing the conceptions of their 
brain, will not be bound by any system. The advantages of the natural 
method were long in overcoming the force of habit, kept up as it was by 
the number of works which the German press supplied for the use of 
collectors and technical botanists. The most important of these took 
the form of new editions of Linneus’s ‘Systema Vegetabilium’ or of his 
‘Species Plantarum.’ The last two of these had a very general circulation 
in the botanical world: Sprengel’s, completed in four volumes from 1817 to 
1820, would have been useful from its compactness had it been a conscientious 
compilation, and actually served for the arrangement of herbaria in the charge of 
mere librarians *; but it was so carelessly and recklessly worked out as to be 
soon rejected by all true botanists who attempted to use it, Roemer and 
Schultes’s ‘ Systema,’ continued through eight volumes from 1817 to 1830, was 
the result of great labour and was generally accurate in detail, and would 
have been really useful had it been brought to a conclusion within a short 
time. But by the time it had reached the end of Hexandria, the progress 
of De Candolle’s ‘Prodromus’ had even in Germany driven it out of the 
- market, leaying it, in its incomplete state, nothing but a long succession of 
disconnected genera, the confusion of which was still further increased by a 
series of ‘Mantissas’ and first and second Additamenta to ‘Mantissas.’ Neither 
the ability of the younger Schultes, the author of the last two and best 
volumes (Hexandria), nor the arguments of Roemer (who in the preface 
justified the use of the sexual system, first on the authority of Linneus, 
secondly because it was easy, and thirdly because, like nature, it never changed) 
could any longer sustain the crumbling fabric, The Natural Orders were 
becoming generally taught, and Bartling, in his ‘Ordines Naturales Plantarum,’ 
1830, had proposed one of those speculative rearrangements of the Jussieuan 
and Candollean Orders which have since been so frequently indulged in to 
so little purpose. But as yet there was no flora of the country or other 
practical work calculated to place the natural or scientific method within 
reach of the beginner, 
Other more distant countries showed still fewer outward signs of the spread 
of the philosophical teaching of botanical systems, which, however, through 
the influence especially of French works, was gradually gaining ground in 
* Even at Paris the rich herbaria of Delessert were to the last arranged according to 
Sprengel, to the thorough disgust of all working botanists who had to consult them, 
