Page:An introduction to physiological and systematical botany (1st edition).djvu/436

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406
NATURAL SYSTEM

especially, in his 14th edition of the book just mentioned, has inserted new plants without any regard to this original plan of the work.

From the foregoing remarks it is easy to comprehend what is the real and highly important use of the Genera Plantarum of Jussieu arranged in Natural Orders, the most learned botanical work that has appeared since the Species Plantarum of Linnæus, and the most useful to those who study the philosophy of botanical arrangement. The aim of this excellent author is to bring the genera of plants together as much as possible according to their natural affinities; contructing his Classes and Orders rather from an enlarged and general view of those affinities, than from technical characters previously assumed for each Class or Order; except great and primary divisions, derived chiefly from the Cotyledons, the Petals, and the insertion of the Stamens. But his characters are so far from absolute, that at the end of almost every Order we find a number of genera merely related to it, and not properly belonging to it, and at the end of the