and another worth consulting in Michel Adanson's 'Histoire de la Botanique' (Paris, 1864). It is sufficient for our present purpose to consider more particularly the labours of the four men whose names have recently been mentioned.
Robert Morison[1], who was born in Aberdeen in 1620 and died in London in 1683, was the first after Cesalpino and Bauhin who devoted himself to systematic botany, that is, to founding and perfecting the classification of plants. He was reproached by his contemporaries and successors with having borrowed without acknowledgment from Cesalpino; this was an exaggeration. Morison commenced his efforts as a systematist with a careful examination of Kaspar Bauhin's 'Pinax'; there he obtained his conceptions of natural relationship in plants; and if he afterwards founded his own system more peculiarly on the forms of the fruit, it was in a very different way from that adopted by Cesalpino. Linnaeus answers the reproach above-mentioned by the pertinent remark, that Morison departs as far from Cesalpino in this point as he is inferior to him in the purity of his method. In the year 1669 appeared a work with the characteristic title, 'Hallucinationes Kaspari Bauhini in Pinace turn in digerendis quam denominandis plantis,' which Haller justly calls an 'invidiosum opus'; for as there are writers at all times who ungratefully accept all that is good and weighty in their predecessors as self-evident, while they point with malicious pleasure to every little mistake which the originator of a great idea may commit, so Morison has no word of recognition for the great and obvious merits of the 'Pinax,' though such a recognition was specially due from one whose design was to point out the numerous mistakes in that work on the subject of affinities. Kurt Sprengel in his
- ↑ Morison served in the royal army against Cromwell, and after the defeat of his party retired to Paris, where he studied botany under Robin. He was made physician to Charles II and Professor of Botany in 1660, and Professor of the same faculty in Oxford ten years later. See Sprengel, 'Geschichte der Botanik,' ii. p. 30.
