plantarum' of Bartling, an independent contribution to this department of botany, and a distinct advance upon what had hitherto been effected. The contemporary monographs of Roeper on the Euphorbiaceae and Balsamineae and his treatise 'De organis plantarum' (1828), are an able, independent, and logical application of the principles of the morphology of the flower laid down by De Candolle and Brown to the elucidation of morphological and systematic conceptions. But the new methods of investigation introduced by De Candolle and Robert Brown had to encounter in Germany, and to some extent in France also, not only the antiquated views of Linnaeus, but, what was still worse, the erroneous notions of the nature-philosophy founded by Schelling. The misty tenets of this philosophy could scarcely find a more fruitful soil than the natural system with its mysterious affinities, and Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis contributed not a little to increase the confusion. These historical phenomena will be further considered in the following chapter; at present we are more concerned to show how the professed systematists pursued the path opened by De Candolle and Brown. And here it must be noticed that from about the year 1830, in Germany especially, morphological enquiry became separated as a special subject from systematic botany; it became more and more the fashion to treat the latter as independent of morphology, and thus to forsake the source of deeper insight which comparative and genetic morphology alone can open to the systematist; morphology on the other hand took a new flight, and as it thus developed itself apart from pure systematic botany, its progress must be described by itself in a later portion of this history.
If advance in systematic botany depended on the number of systems that were proposed from 1825 to 1845, that period must be looked upon as its golden age; no less than twenty-four systems made their appearance during these twenty years, without counting those which were inspired by the views of the
