THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 47 



andria, Diandria, Triandria, etc Stamens and pistils exist in all 

 the classes except the twenty-fourth, which embraces the Crypto- 

 gamia. The orders are founded, as far as possible, on a similar 

 number, situation or arrangement, of the pistils. The strongest 

 recommendation and the sole aim of the Linnsean artificial system 

 was to help anyone to- learn the name and history of an unknown 

 plant, in the most easy and certain manner, and even after the 

 recognition of the natural system, it was customary to prefix it to 

 Floras as a key to the genera. It stands unrivalled as a convenient 

 artificial classification of plants, and the impetus its introduction 

 gave to the study of botany throughout the civilized world is with- 

 out a parallel. Although its classes and orders have passed away, 

 the Linnasan genera and species have stood the test of time most 

 wonderfully, a fact owing to the remarkable exactness of the great 

 author's descriptions, as well as his keen preception of the true rela- 

 tionships of plants. 



Not least among the wonderful works of Linnaeus was his in- 

 troduction of a binomial nomenclature, or the method of distin- 

 guishing every plant by only two words. Prior to his time a whole 

 sentence was often required to express the name of a plant, and to- 

 such a length had many of the names grown that had it continued 

 the study of botany must have been abandoned from its mere un- 

 wieldiness. The terrible labor of handling these long names may 

 be judged from the following extract from a letter of Dillenius to 

 Linnseus. 



" In your last letter I find a plant gathered in Charles Island, 

 on the coast of Gothland, which you judge to be Polygonum erec- 

 tum angustifolium, floribus candidis of Mentzelius, and Caryophyllum 

 saxatilis, foliis gramineis, umbellatis corymbis of Bauhin ; nor do I 

 object. But it is by no means Tournefort's Lychnis alpina linifolia, 

 multiflora, perampla radice, whose flowers are more scattered and 

 leaves broader in the middle, though narrower at the end." 



The poor plant, the object of all these opprobrious epithets, 

 seems to have been Gypsophila fastigiata, L., a Swiss plant of the 

 order Caryophyllacese. ' 



Linnaeus himself did not at first perceive the great value of a 

 binomial nomenclature, and in his early works he distinguished 

 species by the long explanatory phrases of the older botanists ; thus, 

 in his "Flora Lapponica," he names a violet, "Viola foliis subro-- 



