Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/61

 assumed from the first an entirely different expression in his system from that which it received at the hands of de l'Obel and Bauhin, inasmuch as he was not guided by an indistinct feeling for resemblances, but believed that he could establish on predetermined grounds a system of marks, by which the objective relationship must be recognised. If Cesalpino was thus in advance of the German botanists, since he endeavoured to express with clearness and on principle that which they only felt indistinctly, he was at the same time treading a dangerous path, and one which led succeeding botanists astray till the time of Linnaeus,—the path which must always lead to artificial classifications, since the natural system can never be laid down upon a priori principles of division. Through this labyrinth, in which botanists down to Linnaeus wandered fruitlessly hither and thither, there remained one guide consistently pointing to the goal to be attained, namely, the feeling for natural affinity first vividly apprehended by the German botanists, and expressed by them to some extent in their classifications. And when at last Linnaeus and Bernard de Jussieu made the first feeble attempts at a natural arrangement, it was the same indistinct perception which asserted itself in them as in de l'Obel and Bauhin, and enabled them to see that the path hitherto trodden could only lead astray.

The period in the development of descriptive botany which begins with Cesalpino and reaches to Linnaeus may accordingly be perhaps best characterised by saying, that botanists sought to do justice to natural affinities by means of artificial classifications, till at length Linnaeus clearly perceived the contradiction involved in this method of proceeding. But inasmuch as Linnaeus left it to the future to work out the natural system, and arranged the plants which he described in a confessedly artificial manner, he so far marks rather the close of a previous condition of the science than the beginning of modern botany.

These introductory observations will have supplied the reader with the thread which will guide him through the