Recent Progress and present State of Systematic Botany. 289 
pean herbaria, and been in correspondence with all and in per- 
sonal acquaintance with most of the notable botanists of the 
last forty or fifty years, and, finally, who is at the present time 
the most productive and the soundest of systematic botanists, 
cannot be otherwise than replete with interest. 
We will pass over Mr. Bentham’s retrospect of the first great 
movement of modern botany over the Linnzan thoroughfare to 
a knowledge of genera and species, and also of that of his and 
our own days, by which we have ascended a higher platform of 
ordinal classification along the path, once so difficult, but now 
made available and easy through the laborsand genius of Jussieu, 
Brown, DeCandolle, and other but less illustrious pioneers ; an 
we come down to ‘the next period in the progress of systematic 
1859.” 
owed any 
longer to eschew the labor of the methodical study of plants, 
or to indulge in the belief that their technical sorting consti- 
tuted the science. * * >, ¥. * 
“Tt would seem that at this advanced stage of our progress 
the guide-posts of the principal paths had become so firm 
established, the principles upon which plants should be scien- 
tifically classed so clearly laid down, and so far carried into 
practice, that little remained to be done toward completing the 
survey of the territory—toward a general distribution of species 
according to their natural affinities—beyond the more accurate 
delineation of details and the interpolation of newly-discovered 
Species; and that the systematic fi could already look 
toward that summit upon reaching which his labors in aid of 
the general advance of the science might come to a close. 
_ “But there was a rock ahead which had long been looming 
in the distance, and which on a nearer approach opposed a for- 
midable obstacle. What is a species? and what is the mean- 
ing of those natural affinities according to which species are to 
be classed? were questions which in 1859 it was generally 
thought vain to discuss, or the answers to which, given to us 
by doctrinal teachers, unsupported by or independent of facts, 
