40 REPORT—1874. 
The properties and applied relations, the “ qualitates et usus” of Endli- 
cher’s ‘Enchiridion,’ are very fully exhibited by Lindley, and would only 
require revising in conformity with the advance of the science of applied 
botany, much promoted of late by various important works and essays, and 
in no small degree by the establishment of the Kew Museum. 
The sequence of orders adopted in the ‘ Vegetable Kingdom’ is a very 
objectionable one. The practical convenience of following the Candollean 
sequence in its main features, until some other one shall have been pro- 
pounded which shall prove to be such an improvement as to ensure its 
general adoption, has been too clearly brought forward by Dr. Hooker and 
others to make it necessary for me to repeat the reasons adduced. Lindley 
felt its defects, as we all do, but failed in his repeated attempts to remedy 
them. He was, indeed, so little satisfied with any of the four different 
systems he successively proposed, that he adopted none of them for his own 
herbarium, in which he arranged the orders alphabetically. Brongniart’s 
arrangement has found its way into a few French works, and Endlicher’s 
into a few German ones; but the very numerous ones proposed by other 
French, German, and Swedish systematists have rarely been followed by more 
than the individual authors, and many of them have only been broached in 
text-books without ever having been put into practice. The Candollean 
series is so generally adopted in ‘floras, that these attempts to interfere with 
its universality have hitherto only produced confusion. 
To sum up, it appears to me that the most useful work a competent 
botanist could now apply himself to would be a new ‘ Vegetable Kingdom,’ 
founded on that of Lindley, but extended and modified espa to the 
above suggestions. 
Le Maout and Decaisne’s ‘ Traité de Botanique’ is an excellent and most 
valuable work, bringing down the science, in most respects, to the year 
1868, taking well the place of Lindley’s ‘ Vegetable Kingdom,’ and now our 
standard history of plants. With great original merit it is still further im- 
proved by Hooker’s notes and additions, including a rearrangement of the 
293 orders according to the Candollean sequence; and the illustrations, many 
of them original, from Decaisne’s own drawings, may be thoroughly depended 
upon for that most essential of all qualities, their correctness. Yet in some 
respects it seems to require rewriting, which of course could not be done by 
an editor. Independently of a few oversights and accidental errors, there 
are some partial views which are more or less out of date, and the general 
principles followed are essentially pre-Darwinian. How far the French 
authors may or may not be prepared to adopt the theory of evolution does 
not appear, it is not in any manner alluded to; but the old doctrine that 
affinities are to be determined by a calculation of resemblances, estimated 
according to a fixed scale of the relative value of characters, is as absolutely 
insisted upon by Decaisne and Le Maout as it was by Lindley, and is to a 
certain degree practically carried out in this and others of the principal 
author’s excellent systematic works, with the usual result. Some of the 
groupings of species or genera, which, when tested by the value assigned 
a priori to the characters used, ought to be highly natural, have proved, on 
the contrary, to be purely artificial, This, however, is not frequently the 
case with Decaisne ; he knows too well how to appreciate natural affinities to 
follow strictly in practice the rules so stringently inculcated in theory. 
I can scarcely include Baillon’s ‘ Histoire des Plantes’ amongst methodical 
‘Ordines Plantarum,’ for there is no method in it; it is rather a series of 
essays or notes on the principal genera of various orders taken at random, 
