Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/148

 displayed. To this purpose he applied morphological researches, which in profundity and wealth of thought and in the fruitfulness of their results for the whole domain of systematic botany far surpassed all that Linnaeus and Jussieu had accomplished, and show us that while engaged in his splendid labours in descriptive botany he had caught during his ten years' residence in Paris the true spirit of modern investigation of nature, as it had been developed by the French naturalists of the end of the previous century. Scarcely a trace is to be found in De Candolle of the scholasticism of Cesalpino and Linnaeus, which occasionally makes its appearance even in Jussieu. For instance, he dealt with morphology as essentially the doctrine of the symmetry of form in plants, that is, he found the basis of morphological examination in the relative position and numbers of the organs, disregarding their physico-physiological properties as of no account from the morphological point of view. He was therefore the first who recognised the remarkable discordance between the morphological characters of organs, which are of value for systematic purposes, and their physiological adaptations to the conditions of life, though it must at the same time be acknowledged, that he did not consistently carry out this principle, but committed grave offences against it in laying down his own system. It is a point of the highest interest in De Candolle's morphological speculations, that he was the first who endeavoured to refer certain relations of number and form to definite causes, and thus to distinguish what is primary and important in the symmetry of plants from merely secondary variations, as is seen in his doctrine of the abortion and adherence of organs. In these distinctions De Candolle laid the foundation of morphological views, which, though now modified to some extent, do still contain the chief elements of morphology and the natural system; but his morphological speculations were confined to the domain of the Phanerogams, and chiefly advanced the theory