THE TRAVELLER'S JOY 123 



the seventeenth century. Their French contemporary 

 Tournefort based his grouping too exclusively upon 

 the corolla ; but the German Bachmann, or Rivinus, 

 in 1690, took not only the corolla but also the fruit 

 and seeds into consideration. Linnaeus in 1738 ex- 

 pressed the hope that a " natural system " might 

 be arrived at by the consideration of " the simple 

 symmetry of all the parts," and himself made 

 out sixty-seven " Orders." It was upon the basis of 

 this unfinished sketch by Linneeus that Bernard 

 de Jussieu arranged the plants in the garden 

 of the Trianon for Louis XV. in 1758; and it 

 was in the study of this arrangement that his 

 nephew Antoine Laurent de Jussieu discovered 

 the principle of the relative value of characters. 

 This principle he enunciated in 1773 in a paper 

 read before the Academie des Sciences, in which 

 he used this Order Ranunculaceee as the illustration 

 of his system. 



In early spring the apparently lifeless tangle of 

 twisted, grey, ragged stems of our wild English 

 Clematis, to ivhich the wiry leaf-stalks and some 

 of the withered brown leaves and shabby tufts 

 of feathered fruitlets are still clinging, puts forth 

 rapidly elongating and gracefully curving shoots. 

 These young stems are six-angled, of a dark olive- 

 green colour, and slightly downy. The leaves of 

 the new year unfold early in a vivid yellow-green 

 which may well have suggested to Gerard his name 

 for the plant even before the season of blossom. 

 He speaks of it as " decking and adorning waies and 

 hedges, where people travell, and thereupon I have 



