64 
history of botany. 
, Tournefort, Dodart, Plumier, Feuillee, Boccone, 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, Chelsea, and 
Kew ; and in Holland , those of Amsterdam , Leyden, 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 copio.us 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, and according to these 
wishes the epoch of systematical botany arrived. 
* The Britons were the first who opened this systematic traCl 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 distracted 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 direfilor of the royal garden at Blois, returned to 
England in 1660, 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 Haller, written in the year 1737, in the 
following 
