64 HISTORY OF B O T A N Y. 



Tour NE FORT, Do dart, Plumier, P'eu ili.ee, Boccon e, and many 

 others travelled to remote countries and islands, and acquired merit in 

 natural history. With the love of collecting natural curiosities, which 

 spread more and more throughout Europe^ the botanical gardens be- 

 came also more numerous. In England, those of Oxford, Chehea, and 

 Kew ; and in Holland, those of Amsterdam, Leydcn, and the Hague were 

 established. 



The advantage accruing from these voyages and travels, augmented 

 to an uncommon degree the botanical materials, and rendered them 

 twice as copious as they had been before. Hence a proper systematical 

 method became the more necessary to avoid a Babelonian confusion 

 among the different writers in that science. It required a better com- 

 pass to extricate oneself from such a labryinth, ar.d according to these 

 wishes the epoch of systematical botany arrived. 



The Britons were the first who opened this systematic tra6l in Ro- 

 bert MoRisoN and John Ray, or, as he called himself in Latin, 

 Rajus, both ,of them originally divines. Morison was a native of 

 Aberdeen in Scotland, born there in 1620. He remained a staunch loy- 

 alist during the civil wars which distrafted England, and served even 

 as a soldier ; a situation of life which he could never forget, owing to 

 a dangerous wound he had received. He afterwards went to France, 

 where he was made director of the royal garden at Blois, returned to 

 England in i66o, and was appointed professor of botany at Oxford. 

 His end was tragical. While riding in a curricle through the streets of 

 London, it was overset, and himself thrown on the pavement, by which 

 fall he fraftured his skull in 1683. Linn^us drew his charafter and 

 merits in a letter to Baron Hallek, written in the year 1737, in the 



following 



