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CLASSIFICATION OF PLANTS. 199 
nected with the structure and organs of plants, with an exposition 
of the philosophy of classification, the merits of which are better 
appreciated now than they were in his own days. 
Ray was careful to guard his readers against the supposition 
that classification was other than a means of identification. He 
argued that there was no line of demarcation in nature between 
one group or order, or even genera, and another, or that any system 
could be perfect. ‘What, indeed, I said before, I now repeat and — 
insist on,” he says, “that a system is not to be expected from 
me, which shall be in every respect perfect and complete in all its 
parts; which shall so distribute plants into genera that every 
species shall be included, not one, hitherto anomalous and excep- 
tional, being omitted; and which shall so mark out every genus by 
its peculiar indications and characteristics, that no species shall be 
found of uncertain family, so to speak, and referable to many 
genera. Nor by the very nature of things could this happen. 
For nature (as is sometimes said) makes no leaps, passing from 
one extreme to the other, but takes a middle course, between the 
highest and the lowest, producing a certain order of things of a 
neutral and ambiguous character, partaking of the qualities of the 
objects which most resemble them on either side, as if to connect 
them, leaving it sometimes doubtful to which of the two they 
belong. Besides, Nature objects to be coerced by the narrowness 
of any system ; and as if to show that her liberty and independence 
is perfect, she is in the habit, in every part of creation, of pro- 
ducing singular and anomalous species, which form exceptions to 
the general rule.” 
While he thus enumerated the true principles of classification, 
Ray also laid the foundations of the inductive system, which has 
since distinguished the English school of Botany. He separated 
flowerless from flowering plants, and he divided them again into 
Monocotyledonous and Dicotyledonous plants. 
F orty years after the publication of Tournefort’s system, and 
while Ray was yet pursuing his philosophical investigations, the 
L system appeared. This new mode of distributing vege- 
table species was hailed with admiration. Its author, Charles von 
Linneus, reigned supreme and without a rival till the end of the 
eighteenth century, and even in our days his partisans are neither 
