SXXVlll HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION. 



was making itself felt in the most thoughtful of botanical 

 students. Antoine Laurent de Jussieu's Genera plantarum 

 is the virtual foundation of the views of plant classification now 

 current, and is the ofispring of the Tournefortean teaching. 

 During the lifetime of Smith, the Linnean arrangement was 

 stoutly maintained, and any other system decried by him, 

 whilst his ownership of Linnaeus's Herbarium gave weight to 

 his utterances. His views however were strongly controverted 

 by Richard Anthony Salisbury, who greatly aided S. F. Gray 

 in his Natural Arrangement of British Plants, a work which 

 had the misfortune to appear much in advance of its time. 



Robert Brown and Salisbury were too good observers to rest 

 contented with the Linnean method of classification ; but the 

 former gave himself chiefly to observation of the minute parts 

 of plants, and the discrimination of sundry genera; whilst 

 Salisbury was never fairly represented by any productions 

 worthy of his great ability. 



The text-book of English Field Botanists for many years 

 was Hooker's British Flora, which was indebted to men like 

 William Borrer of Henfield, Wm. Wilson of Warrington, and 

 Joseph Woods for much that was valuable. The insular neglect 

 of continental work, initiated by Smith, was continued to the 

 great detriment of critical botany, until the publication of 

 Babington's Manual startled many of the old school into 

 compulsory attention to foreign workers. Critical botany, as 

 shown in the works of Boreau, Grenier and Godron, Koch, and 

 Eeichenbach, has since been exaggerated by Alexis Jordan 

 and his followers into an impracticable and futile extreme. 

 Contemporaneously with this species of discrimination, the 

 development-history of the various plant organs was pursued 

 on the continent by Schleiden, Hugo von Mohl, and others, 

 and has been energetically prosecuted by Sachs and a multi- 

 tude besides. Schleiden's cell-theory marked an important 

 epoch in botany, whilst the next great impulse was given by 



