Antoine Laurent de Jus&ieu. 295 



t 



in* natural groups. Some eminent botanists, however, had not fail- 

 ed to perceive the importance of characters best calculated to divide 

 the vegetable kingdom into a few great natural classes. Thus Ray 

 in 1682, and Boerhaave in 1710, had recognized the importance of 

 the characters furnished by the embryo, and adduced the distinction 

 of monocotyledones and dicotyledones, although they often made an 

 inaccurate application of this principle. But their classification in 

 other respects, although preserving, like all other systems, a consi- 

 derable number of natural groups, is too systematic to avoid the in- 

 troduction of many which are completely artificial. All the older 

 methods, besides, admit the separation into trees and herbs, which, 

 for the most part, interrupts all natural relations. 



Linne, who so greatly advanced the progress of botany by the pre- 

 cision he introduced into the science, by the simplicity of his sexual 

 system, and by his sagacious researches into the most interesting 

 phenomena of vegetable life, is pre-eminently entitled, from the en- 

 thusiasm of his numerous disciples, to be regarded as the head of a 

 systematic school, although he has positively declared that he used 

 every effort to lay the foundation of a natural method. Of this he 

 has presented us with a sketch in his Classes Plantarum in 1738, 

 and a new edition in his PhUosophia Bolanica in 1750. 



He always esteemed this method preferable to every other, 

 and considered it as the essential object of science ; but it must be 

 admitted that if he was the first in attempting to indicate some frag- 

 ments (as he himself expresses it) of the natural method, these frag- 

 ments were extremely imperfect in many respects ; for of the sixty- 

 seven groups he established, only the half nearly correspond to such 

 as have been retained, while the others are united to genera pertain- 

 ing to very different families. 



Moreover, Linne has neither indicated the characters of these 

 groups, nor pointed out the principles by which he was guided in 

 forming them. It may even be supposed that he has allowed him- 

 self to be directed rather by the natural perception of affinities which 

 a botanist of such discrimination necessarily possessed, than by a 

 profound and comparative study of the organization of the different 

 genera associated in each of his groups. It is easily perceived that 

 he was guided by no fixed principle in the formation of his different 

 natural orders, for in some of them, the Sarmentacece, for example, 

 the dicotyledones and monocotyledones are mingled almost in equal 

 numbers ; while in other instances, this is the case with the mono- 

 petales and the polypetales, as in his Dumosos and Vepreculaz. 



To Linne succeeded Adanson and Bernard de Jussieu, who de- 



