Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/158

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138
Development of the Natural System under
[Book I.

round which individual forms are grouped as crystals round their parent form, De Candolle was quite consistent in his views. The mode of representation came to prevail in the vegetable kingdom which De Candolle's contemporary, Cuvier, an equally sturdy defender of the dogma of constancy, had introduced in the animal kingdom as the type-theory. Thus the most splendid results obtained by induction were united in the case of De Candolle with the barren dogma of the constancy of species, which, as Lange wittily remarks, comes direct from Noah's ark, to form an intimate mixture of truth and error; nor did De Candolle's many adherents succeed in unravelling the coil, though they removed the chief errors from his system and introduced many improvements.

To these remarks may be appended a table of the main divisions of De Candolle's system of 1819, which so far as it is presented in linear arrangement he calls expressly an artificial system.

I. Vascular plants or plants with cotyledons.

1. Exogens or Dicotyledons.
A. With calyx and corolla:
Thalamiflorals (polypetalous hypogynous),
Calyciflorals (polypetalous perigynous),
Corolliflorals (gamopetalous).
B. Monochlamydeous plants (with a single floral envelope).
2. Endogens or Monocotyledons.
A. Phanerogams (true Monocotyledons),
B. Cryptogams (vascular Cryptogams including Naiadeae).

II. Cellular plants or Acotyledons.

A. With leaves (Muscineae),
B. Without leaves (Thallophytes).

The number of families, with Linnaeus 67, with A. L. de Jussieu 100, was increased by De Candolle to 161.