Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/133

 thus their true morphological character is often entirely obscured; on the other hand, the younger the organs are, the less is this difficulty experienced, and this is the real reason why the history of development is of so great service to morphology. It was then one of the characteristic features of the period we are describing, that its morphology was formed upon the study of matured forms; the history of development, or at all events of very early stages of development, could not be turned to account till after 1840, for skill in the use of the microscope, here indispensable, was not sufficiently advanced before that time to make it possible to follow the growth of organs from their first beginnings.

The establishment of natural affinities combined with the assumption of the constancy of species, the growth of comparative morphology without the history of development, lastly, the very subordinate attention still paid to the Cryptogams,—these are the special characteristics of the period which has now to be described at greater length.

Here we must once more call attention to the fact, that Linnaeus was the first to perceive that a system which was to be the expression of natural affinities could not be attained in the way pursued by Cesalpino and his immediate successors. All who have attentively studied the writings of Linnaeus which appeared after the 'Classes Plantarum' (1738) must have seen the difference between that way and the one recommended by him—a difference which is the more obvious because Linnaeus himself, like his predecessors, constructed an artificial system on predetermined principles of classification, and always employed it for practical purposes, while he published at the same time in the above-named work his fragment of a natural system, and in the preface set forth the peculiar features of the natural and artificial systems in striking contrast with one another. The first thing and the last, he says in his prefatory remarks to his