Page:An introduction to physiological and systematical botany (1st edition).djvu/388

 358, by which plants might conveniently be arranged, like words in a dictionary, so as to be most readily found. If all the words of a language could be disposed according to their abstract derivations, or grammatical affinities, such a performance might be very instructive to a philosopher, but would prove of little service to a young scholar; nor has it ever been mentioned as any objection to the use of a dictionary, that words of very different meanings, if formed of nearly the same letters, often stand together. The Method of Linnæus therefore is just such a dictionary in Botany, while his Philosophia Botanica is the grammar, and his other works contain the history, and even the poetry, of the science.

But before we give a detail of his artificial system, we must first see how this great man fixed the fundamental principles of botanical science. Nor are these principles confined to botany, though they originated in that study. The Linnæan style of discriminating plants, has been extended by himself and others to animals and even fossils; and his admirable principles of nomenclature are applied with