to the year 1820, and their results appeared in a long series of monographs on different families in the Mémoires du Museum. He felt with De Candolle, Robert Brown, and later systematists, that the perfecting of the natural system depended mainly on the careful establishing and defining of families. His efforts received a new impulse from the work of a German writer, whose first volume had appeared in 1788, a year therefore before the 'Genera Plantarum,' a second following it in 1791, and a supplementary volume in 1805.
This work was Joseph Gärtner's[1] 'De fructibus et seminibus plantarum,' in which the fruits and seeds of more than a thousand species are described and carefully figured. But almost more important than these numerous descriptions, though they offered rich material to the professed systematists, were the introductions to the first two volumes, and especially to those of 1788. They contain valuable reflections on sexuality in plants, a subject which had remained in the condition in which it was left by Camerarius (1694) till it was greatly developed by Koelreuter after 1761, and had since then been little studied, and an account of the morphology of fruits and seeds, the knowledge of which had gone back rather than advanced since the days of Malpighi and Grew. Gärtner was well qualified for this work by his unparalleled knowledge of the forms of fruits, and still more by the character of his mind. Free from
- ↑ Joseph Gärtner was born at Calw in Würtenberg in 1732, and died in 1791. He commenced his studies in Göttingen in 1751, where he was a pupil of Haller. He travelled into Italy, France, Holland, and England in order to make the acquaintance of famous naturalists, and worked also at physics and zoology. In 1760 he was Professor of Anatomy in Tübingen, and in 1768 became Professor of Botany at St. Petersburg; but finding himself unable to bear the climate, he returned to Calw in 1770, and gave himself up entirely to his book, 'De fructibus et seminibus plantarum,' which he had already commenced. Banks and Thunberg, one of whom had returned from a voyage round the world, the other from Japan, handed over to him the collections of fruits which they had made. His persistent study, partly with the microscope, brought him near to blindness. There is an interesting life of Gärtner by Chaumeton in the 'Biographie Universelle.'
