158 Systematic Botany. 



inspicere, magistri unius verbis addictum esse, sed rusticos mon- 

 tanosque homines interrogdre oportere" 



At this period a new era in botany may be said to have 

 commenced. The trammels of the schools were shaken off, 

 and men began to consult their own understandings, and to 

 trust to their own experience, and to the previously unopened 

 volume of nature for the materials of science. Accordingly 

 we find, from Otho Brunfels, who died in 1534, down to 

 Csesalpinus, the earliest botanist who introduced a system- 

 atic arrangement into his writings, and who died in 1602, a 

 long succession of authors who may be generally called 

 original, and whose labours had been gradually adding to the 

 number of known plants, in such a degree that the summary 

 of their discoveries, as we find them recorded in the History 

 of Plants compiled by the Bauhins, and published in 1623, 

 cannot be estimated at a lower number than 5000 ; of which 

 more than 600 were then for the first time described ; a very 

 considerable number if compared with the slow progress which 

 botany had made up to that time. 



At even this date, however, it is scarcely possible to consider 

 botany to have attained the rank of a science ; and it was not 

 till after the splendid labours of Morison and Ray that it 

 finally assumed, in the elegant Institutes of the indefatigable 

 Tournefort, published at Paris, in three volumes quarto, in 

 1770, that rank which it now holds among the sciences. This 

 work, compiled with great care, and adapted to the system 

 peculiar to its author, must be considered the first Species 

 Plant arum ; and from the perfect manner in which it was exe- 

 cuted, affords distinct evidence of the number of plants known 

 to botanists at the end of the seventeeth century. The plants no- 

 ticed in this work amount, the corallines being excluded, upon 

 a careful calculation, to about 8800. But Tournefoi't, who 

 was little solicitous for the distinctions of species, having ad- 

 mitted a vast number of double flowers and slight varieties 

 into his list, it is necessary to make a considerable deduction 

 from the whole amount of his names on that account, in 

 order to obtain a just view of the number of species known in 

 his day, as compared with what are esteemed species by 

 modern botanists. The number thus to be deducted may be 

 estimated at one -third; so that the species really known to 

 Tournefort appear to have been some where about 6000, 

 including both phaenogamous and cryptogamous vegetation. 



Now let us trace the progress by which this stock of know- 

 ledge was acquired, and see how far our position is supported 

 up to the end of the seventeenth century. In the Holy Bible 

 it has been ascertained, from the investigations of Sprengel, 



