Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/138

 many important points of view, from which they could afterwards be discovered, and it certainly became the foundation for all further advance in the natural method of classification; for this reason it is necessary to give a view of it in the following table:— A. L. de Jussieu's System of 1789.

This table shows that Jussieu did not oppose the Cryptogams, which he calls Acotyledones, to the whole body of Phanerogams, as Ray did under the name of Imperfectae; he rather regards the Acotyledones as a class co-ordinate with the Monocotyledones and Dicotyledones; but this mistake or similar mistaken views run through all systematic botany up to 1840; the morphology founded by Nägeli and by Hofmeister's embryological investigations first showed that the Cryptogams separate into several divisions, which co-ordinate with the Monocotyledons and Dicotyledons. At the same time the use of the word Acotyledones for Linnaeus' Cryptogams shows that Jussieu overrated the systematic value of the cotyledons, because, as is seen from the introduction to his 'Genera Plantarum,' he was quite in the dark on the subject of the great difference between the spores of Cryptogamic plants and the seeds of Phanerogams. His conception of the organs of