Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/95

 it he declines the great quantity of unnecessary work with which botanists occupied themselves, and declares the scientific study of plants to be the only end and aim of botany. He first treats of naming, and lays down with respect to generic and specific names the principles which Linnaeus afterwards consistently applied, whereas Bachmann himself did not follow his own precepts, but injured his reputation as a botanist by a tasteless nomenclature. Nevertheless he declared distinctly that the best plan is to designate each plant by two words, one of which should be the name of the genus, the other that of the species, and he ingeniously pointed out the great convenience of this binary nomenclature in dealing with medicinal plants, and in the writing of prescriptions. He refused to regard cultivated varieties as species, though Tournefort and others continued to do so.

In his system he rejected the division into trees, shrubs, and herbs, showing by good examples that there is no real distinction of the kind in nature. From many of his remarks in his critical dissertations we might infer that he possessed a very fine feeling for natural relationship, but at the same time expressions occur which seem to show that he did not at all appreciate its importance in the system; we notice this in Tournefort also. Because flowers come before the fruit he jumps with curious logic to the conclusion that the main divisions in the system should be derived from the flower, and in following this rule he makes use of exactly that mark in the corolla which has the least value for classification, namely, regularity or irregularity of form. It is strange, moreover, that Bachmann, who spent a considerable fortune on the production of copper-plate figures of plants without any special object, though he founded his system on the form of the flower, should yet have devoted only a superficial study to its construction; his account of it is very inferior to that of any one before or since his time. His classification thus founded cannot be said to be an advance in systematic botany;