234 Martins, on the Life and Labors of De Candolle. 



which its founder had represented it, to the species, and giving 

 by means of it a full and satisfactory description of the latter. 



In order to have a due conception of the vastness of this un- 

 dertaking, and its enormous difficulties, it is necessary that we 

 should glance at the progress of descriptive botany. This part 

 of the science, which so many regard as a lifeless register, 

 others as the whole sum of botanical knowledge, dates no far- 

 ther back, in a systematic form, than the sixteenth century. 

 In 1584, Conrad Gessner published the first methodized work 

 upon the vegetable kingdom. In 1623, Caspar Bauhin produced 

 the first systematic register, [Pinax,] in which about seven thou- 

 sand species of plants were indicated by names and some de- 

 scription, but without characteristics. Tournefort published the 

 first work which can be properly called a systematic arrange- 

 ment, in the years 1694 and 1700. His work contains nine 

 thousand five hundred and sixteen articles, or about eight thou- 

 sand species of plants ; and this number was not materially in- 

 creased in the next succeeding general work, the Historia Plan- 

 tarum of Ray, in the years 1693 to 1704. In 1737, Linnasus 

 gave his first systematic description of known plants. As Tourne- 

 fort had introduced the conception of genera into science, that 

 of species was now established, along with a method of de- 

 scription based on a well-founded and enlarged terminology. 

 But Linnaeus in throwing overboard a vast number of old and 

 unintelligible accounts of plants as useless ballast, at once redu- 

 ced the list of species to about seven thousand, a number which 

 in the later editions of his Sy sterna may have been increased 

 to about twelve thousand. Since that time the increase of ac- 

 knowledged species has been truly prodigious. In the last of 

 the works of Linnaeus in the year 1760, we find in the first 

 five classes of his sexual system 1,835 species of plants ; Vit- 

 man in 1790, has 3,491 ; Willdenovv in 1797, 4,831 ; Persoon 

 in 1806, 6,121 ; Romer and Schultes from 1817 to 1823, 13,519 

 species. In the first edition of Steudel's Nomenclator Botani- 

 cns, the first complete Pinax since Bauhin, the number of genera 

 of phaenogamous plants, or of the first twenty three classes of the 

 Linnasan system, amounts to 3,376, and that of species to 39,684: 

 the second edition of this celebrated work, on the other hand, 

 which was finished in the current year 1841, reckons of phasno- 

 gamous plants 6,722 genera, and 78,005 species. 



