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EVOLUTION OF NATURAL SYSTEM
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Natural Orders of similar designation. A remarkable, if not altogether successful, attempt in the same direction was Adanson's Families des Plantes (1763), based upon the sound Linnean principle, "qu'il ne peut i avoir de Methode naturele en Botanicke, que celle qui considere l'ensemble de toutes les parties des Plantes." The number of species and varieties known in his day amounted to something over eighteen thousand: these, reduced into 1615 genera, he grouped into fifty-eight families. Several of those had been already more or less well defined; but most of them were entirely original, and not a few of them persist to the present day, though Adanson is not credited with all that are his due. His lack of method in naming his families, to say nothing of the fantastic nomenclature of his genera, made it necessary for other names to be preferred to his. Still some familiar names of natural orders are attributable to him, such as Hepaticae, Onagrae, Compositae, Caprifolia, Borragines, Portulacae, Amaranthi, Papavera, Cisti, though most of them have since undergone some change in their termination. In addition to these, there are several which would have been credited to Adanson, had it not so happened that they had also been suggested by Bernard de Jussieu: such are, Palmae, Aristolochiae, Myrti, Campanulae, Apocyna, Verbenae, Thymeleae, Gerania, Malvae, Ranunculi. Adanson was the first to publish these names (1763): but Bernard de Jussieu had made use of them as early as 1759 in laying out the Trianon Garden at Versailles, though they were not actually published until 1789, when all the 65 orders devised by him were included in the Genera Plantarum secundum Ordines Naturales disposita of his famous nephew Antoine Laurent de Jussieu. Here at last was a fairly complete natural system, consisting of one hundred natural orders arranged in fifteen classes, within the three great subdivisions, Acotyledones, Monocotyledones, Dicotyledones, constituting the framework of that which is accepted at the present day. It has undergone many modifications, of which the first and most important were those effected by A. P. de Candolle (Théorie Élémentaire, 1813), who, while he improved upon Jussieu in various ways, made the unfortunate, but happily unsuccessful, attempt to substitute "Endogenae" for "Monocotyledones" and