40 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



tundis cordatis pedunculis radicatis," which translated would make 

 the name of the plant, the violet with long-peduncled, subro- 

 tund, cordate root-leaves. This unwieldy title for the common 

 European marsh-violet, he afterwards, in his "Species Plantarum," 

 where he first used, as he terms them, trivial names, converted 

 into Viola palustris, the name it still bears. 



With Linnaeus I will close what I have named the Artificial, 

 and enter on the Natural epoch of botany, for though his system of 

 classes and orders held sway for nearly a hundred years, and some 

 of you probably studied it in one or more of the numerous authors 

 who copied him, yet, even before his death, there had begun to 

 spring up the natural system which is now in use That Linnasus 

 himself recognized the importance and superiority of such a system 

 we know by the following extract from one of his letters on the 

 subject to the celebrated Professor Haller of Gottingen. 



" I have never spoken of my sexual system as a natural method ; 

 on the contrary, in my Systema I have said, ' No natural botanical 

 system has yet been constructed, though one or two may be more 

 so than others; nor do I contend that this system is by any means 

 natural. I do not deny that a natural method is preferable, not 

 only to my system, but to all that have been invented. Probably I 

 may, on a future occasion, propose some fragments of such a one. 

 Meanwhile, till that is discovered, artificial systems are indispensa- 

 ble.' " 



This expressed intention to attempt a natural classification was 

 carried into effect by an effort to group the known genera under 

 sixty-seven natural orders, Piperitse, Palmge, Amentacese, etc., but 

 was afterwards abandoned. 



The problem was taken up by a contemporary and correspond- 

 ent of Linnaeus, Bernard de Jussieu, a Frenchman and curator of 

 the Royal Garden at Trianon, who, however, left nothing in writing 

 but a bare catalogue of the gardens, and it was left for a pupil of 

 his, one Michael Adanson, a native of Provence, to first publish, in 

 his "Familes des Plantes," 1763, a complete system of natural 

 orders. Under this system one class consisted of all plants with 

 similar roots, another of all with similar stems, and a third of all with 

 similar leaves as regarded form and situation, but the most important 

 distinctions he considered as founded on the organs of fructifica- 

 tion. The system of this ingenious botanist, whose name is pre- 



