My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

io8MY LIFElocal botanist of some repute, which seemed to me someagre, so uninteresting, and so utterly unlike whatsuch a lecture ought to be, that I wanted to try if Icould not do something better. The lecture inquestion consisted in an enumeration of the wholeseries of the " Linnaean Classes and Orders," statingtheir characters and naming a few of the plantscomprised in each. It was illustrated by a series ofcoloured figures on cards about the size of ordinaryplaying cards, which the lecturer held up one afterthe other to show what he was talking about. TheLinnaean system was upheld as being far the mostuseful as a means of determining the names of plants,and the natural system was treated as quite uselessfor beginners, and only suited for experiencedbotanists.All this was so entirely opposed to views I hadalready formed, that I devoted a large portion of mylecture to the question of classification in general,showed that any classification, however artificial, wasbetter than none, and that Linnaeus made a greatadvance when he substituted generic and specificnames for the short Latin descriptions of speciesbefore used, and by classifying all known plants bymeans of a few well-marked and easily observedcharacters.I then showed how and why this classificationwas only occasionally, and as it were accidentally,a natural one ;that in a vast number of cases itgrouped together plants which were essentially unlikeeach other ;and that for all purposes, except thenaming of species, it was both useless and inconvenient.I then showed what the natural system ofclassification really was, what it aimed at, and the muchgreater interest it gave to the study of botany. Iexplained the principles on which the various natural