Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/129

 Rh text-book of botany came to look more like a Latin dictionary than a scientific treatise. In proof of this we may appeal to Bernhardi's 'Handbuch der Botanik,' published at Erfurt in 1804, and Bernhardi was one of the best representatives of German botany of the time. How botany, especially in Germany, gradually degenerated under the influence of Linnaeus' authority into an easy-going insipid dilettantism may very well be seen from the botanical periodical, entitled 'Flora,' the first volumes of which cover the greater part of the first fifty years of the 19th century; it is scarcely conceivable how men of some cultivation could occupy themselves with such worthless matter. It would be quite lost labour to give any detailed account of this kind of scientific life, if it can be so called, this dull occupation of plant-collectors, who called themselves systematists, in entire contravention of the meaning of the word. It is true indeed that these adherents of Linnaeus did some service to botany by searching the floras of Europe and of other quarters of the globe, but they left it to others to turn to scientific account the material which they collected. But before this evil had spread very widely, a new direction to the study of systematic botany and morphology was given in France, where the sexual system had never met with great acceptance. Bernard de Jussieu and his nephew, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, taking up Linnaeus' profounder and properly scientific efforts, made the working out of the natural system, in Linnaeus' own opinion the highest aim of botany, the task of their lives. Here more was needed than a perpetual repetition of descriptions of single plants after a fixed pattern; more exact inquiries into the organisation of plants, and especially of the parts of the fructification, must supply the foundation of larger natural groups. It was a question therefore of new inductive investigation, of real physical science, of penetrating into the secrets of organic form, whereas the botanists who confined themselves to Linnaeus' art of description made no new discoveries respecting the nature of plants. And if these men