RECENT PROGRESS OF SYSTEMATIC BOTANY. Al 
intended, in the first instance, to illustrate Payer’s views on organogenesis, 
and thence enlarged into desultory reviews of the orders, exhibiting in many 
instances undoubted talent, containing a number of shrewd observations, 
accompanied by beautiful illustrations, and followed by technical characters 
of genera, in which but very little is original, being mostly transcripts from 
our ‘Genera Plantarum’ and some other works. The result is a work not suffi- 
ciently concise, exact, or methodical for scientific reference, too much encum- 
bered with technical matter for general popular use, although it may well 
adorn a scientific drawing-room table. It was begun in 1867, and four 
volumes and a half are now completed. These, however, scarcely embrace 
one sixth of the vegetable kingdom; and if the same plan is followed 
throughout, the work must ultimately extend to some five and twenty to 
thirty volumes. An English translation is in progress, two volumes being 
already published. That Baillon should have undertaken so cumbersome a 
work, with so little of that clear method for which his countrymen are justly 
celebrated, is the more to be regretted, as the theory of organogenesis, which 
it has been his great object to develop, is one of the greatest aids recently 
introduced into the investigation and determination of natural affinities, 
wherever it has been critically applied and properly checked by other classes 
of observations. 
2. Genrra Prantarvm, or Systematic Descriptions of all the Genera con- 
stituting the Vegetable Kingdom. 
This is the utmost extent to which we can expect to see all known plants 
methodized and described within the limits of a single work by a single 
author ; and even in that work they can only be treated of scientifically and 
technically for the use of the botanist, without the generalities and accessory 
details which adapt the ‘Ordines Plantarum’ to a wider circulation. Taking 
for genera those groups of species, those plant-races of au intermediate grade 
between the order and the species, which appear to be the best defined in 
the present state of nature, and to which the generic nomenclature can be 
applied with the greatest practical advantage, we should estimate them as 
rather above eight thousand for Phenogams and vascular Cryptogams, and at 
least a thousand more for cellular Cryptogams. Such a work can still be 
brought within the compass of about three manageable volumes. Indis- 
pensable as it always is for the working botanist, the demand for it would 
neyer be sufficient to admit of its being simultaneously issued in the three 
generally diffused modern languages, and it therefore usually has been, and 
will still be, most usefully drawn up in botanical Latin. 
Since the introduction of the natural method, there have been but two 
good complete ‘Genera Plantarum,’ the original one of Jussieu in 1789 and 
that of Endlicher, with its supplements ranging over the five years from 
1836 to 1840; the latter was the work of a clear methodical head, applied 
with great care and assiduity to a stock of materials very fair for the time, 
and the general plan is good. But it was necessarily in a great measure a 
compilation, and it affords no means of judging how far the characters given 
had been confirmed by actual observation. This would have been the more 
useful, as it is evident that in many cases ordinal characters are repeated 
under each genus upon no other authority than that the genus had been 
referred by its proposer to the order in question, The work had, moreover, 
become quite out of date; and the need of a new one was so much felt, that 
Dr. Hooker and myself undertook the preparation of a ‘Genera Plantarum’ 
on a plan which long experience had led us to hope might be an improved 
