PREFACE

...[was] decided that a new Method for distinguishing trees—which had not been properly accounted for in that earlier system—needed to be investigated and substituted for it, one more in conformity with Nature than what I had pursued in that small work. This I have performed to the best of my ability in the aforementioned History.

Later, in the year 1690, the most distinguished Mr. Augustus Quirinus Rivinus, Professor of Physiology at the University of Leipzig, published a new Method for plants Stirpium: a Latin term for plants, stocks, or lineages; here referring to the plant kingdom based on the differences between flowers, both in respect to the number of petals and their regular or irregular shape. Having been asked what I thought of this work in very kind letters from Mr. Rivinus himself, I disclosed my views in the preface to my Collection of European Plants growing outside the British Isles original: Stirpium Europæarum, extra Britannias nascentium Syllogen; published 1694, and I added the reasons why his system seemed less acceptable or less preferable to my own. Not long afterward, in a Letter addressed to me, Mr. Rivinus defended his views and sought to vindicate them from my objections.

While I was preparing a response to him, there came into my hands the Elements of Botany (as he calls them) by Mr. Joseph Pitton Tournefort, a Doctor of Medicine from Paris and Professor of Botany. This work was written in French, and in it he claims to derive the characteristic marks of genera from the shape or structure of the flower; nevertheless, in his primary division, he distinguishes herbs into Monopetalous flowers with a single petal forming a tube or bell shape and Polypetalous flowers with several distinct, separate petals. In this work, I found myself mentioned frequently, and almost as often singled out and criticized.