Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/159

 If the principles of comparative morphology laid down by De Candolle were at first prevented from being rapidly disseminated in Germany by the philosophical tendencies then reigning among its botanists, and especially by the obscurities of Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis, yet these principles and his views also on the natural system won their way by degrees to acknowledgment and acceptance; and after the year 1830 the study of the system was prosecuted by the botanists of Germany, as well as by those of England and France, as the proper object of the science. We may even say that the impulse given by De Candolle worked more powerfully from that time forward in Germany than in France. It may be said too of De Candolle's contemporary, the Englishman (1773-1858), whose chief labours fall in the period between 1820 and 1840, that he, like De Candolle, was better