theless, he had no lack of adherents, and among them in Germany, Heucher, Knaut, Ruppius, Hebenstreit, and Ludwig; in England, Hill and others, who made alterations here and there in his system, but any real development of it was from its nature an impossibility; he endeavoured to defend it against the assaults of Ray and Dillen; Rudbeck also declared against him.
Joseph Pitton De Tournefort[1] (1656–1708) founded his system also on the form of the corolla, but his views are to some extent opposed to those of Bachmann. While the latter was pre-eminently critical and deficient in knowledge of species, Tournefort was more inclined to dogmatise, and atoned in the eyes of his contemporaries for want of morphological insight by his extensive acquaintance with individual plants. He is commonly regarded as the founder of genera in the vegetable kingdom; but it has been already shown that the conceptions of genera and species had been framed as early as the 16th century from the describing of plants, and that Kaspar Bauhin also, in naming his plants, consistently distinguished genera and species; moreover Bachmann in 1690 had supported the claims of the binary nomenclature as the most suitable for the designation of plants, though he did not himself adopt it; Tournefort did adopt it, but in an entirely different way from that of Bauhin. Bauhin gave only the name of the genus, and supplied the species with characters; Tournefort, on the other hand, provided his genera with names and characters, and added the species and varieties without special description. Tournefort therefore was not the first who established genera;
- ↑ Tournefort was born at Aix in Provence, and received his early education in a Jesuit college. He was intended for the Church, but after his father's death, in 1677, he was able to devote himself entirely to botany. After travelling in France and Spain, he became Professor at the Jardin des Plantes in 1683; but while thus engaged he made various journeys in Europe, and in 1700 visited Greece, Asia, and Africa—everywhere diligently collecting the plants which he afterwards described.
