l6 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54- 



among creative botanists. We may chance to find historians of 

 less comprehensiveness of view than Tournefort, and some with 

 greater. 



Two generations later a countryman of his, Michel Adanson, 

 sketched less succinctly than Tournefort had done the history 

 of botany. It forms the more important part of a voluminous pre- 

 face to Adanson' s Families des Plantes. ' Eighty-five years after its 

 first publication this History was reprinted, with many augmenta- 

 tions which the author had left in manuscript at the time his death. ^ 



A man whom all nature in her every phase attracted and en- 

 gaged, but still first and last and always a botanist, Adanson's 

 horizon was a broad one. He was also a botanist with a specialty, 

 that of discovering how genera naturally stand together in larger 

 groups that may be called families. On the whole, and if such dis- 

 tinction be allowed as legitimate, he was a systematic botanist; 

 most pronouncedly such. But the sketch that he gives of the 

 his'tory of botany is neither partial nor one-sided. He reviews the 

 science as having progressed along- many lines, not one of them 

 unimportant. But since it is families of plants that he is now to 

 treat of at length, the foremost thought in his mind in the writing of 

 a history of botany as a preface to the book is, that he may demon- 

 strate the early rise and tardy progress of this very idea of plant 

 families. It is not, however, the history of that one aspect of 

 botany merely that he writes. Something a little too near the 

 one-idea history was what Tournefort had presented; even as one 

 may to-day say of the latest of all the historians of our science, that 

 he came rather too near to excluding from very thoughtful consid- 

 eration almost everything except the history of plant anatomy and 

 physiology, and of the taxonomy of the cryptogams. Adanson 

 appears to have realized that no one part of botany is alienable from 

 any other part; that the history of a part of it can not be written 

 as disconnected from that of the other parts; and therefore, con- 

 nectedly with the presentation of whatever had been done before 

 his time towards a natural. correlating or grouping of genera, he 

 brings into view not only that line, but others along which botany 

 has made progress; paying due respect to every kind of effort that 

 makes for a fuller knowledge of the plant world. 



With the main purpose, then, of finding early traces of the re- 

 cognition of something like natural families, Adanson analyzes 



< Families des Plantes, Paris, 1763, Partie I. Preface pp. i-cliv. 

 ' Families Naturelles des Plantes de Michel Adanson, 2 ed. Par MM. 

 Alexandre Adanson et J. Payer, Paris, 1847. 



