all his perseverance to reconcile their discrepancies. Yet strange to say, he does not completely despair of success, for he has again taken them into cultivation, in order to make a new attempt to do what he himself has told us is impossible!

One great purpose such striving after impossibilities has served, like many other theoretical speculations, it has led to the investigation and description of circumstances in form, structure, and organization, which had been and might still have been overlooked,-though we ought not to forget that it may lead to the neglect of other circumstances no less important, but which are unconnected with the system.

This AFFINITY, as it is called, of genera and species, is the leading principle of our present botanists. If they can but establish, by minute comparison of circumstances, that so many plants resemble one another, as that they can class them as an order or as a genus, they think they have reached the summit of the science. It is an equal object of their ambition, if they can, by the same minute comparisons, shew that either Linnæus, Jussieu, Decandolle, Ventenat, Salisbury, or Brown, has placed a plant or a group of plants in a wrong order or genus. This is the highest aim of botanical criticism. Now the whole of this pursuit appears to us, so far as it is not considered an amusement, or an exercise of minute observation, to be quite chimerical and without any foundation in nature; for the affinities so much hunted after, are, in one instance out of two, altogether in the botanists fancy and not in the plants. It is, indeed, just a part of the same dream which pictures a graduated chain of transition in nature, from the most imperfect plant, up to man and to angels. That no such transition really exists, everybody who chooses to look around him may at once perceive, if the prejudice on which it is founded be discarded.

We have a very striking proof of these visionary principles of grouping and of transition, in the acknowledged origin of the Linnæan system. The celebrated Swedish botanist expressly stated, that he divided his Philosophia Botanica into twelve parts, because there were twelve months in the year; and into 365 paragraphs, because this is the number of days in the year; in the same manner, he divided plants into five groups, because we have five fingers on each hand, and five toes on each foot!!! Not quite pleased, however, with this analogy, he intended to have increased the groups to seven, because the world was created in seven days! The names of the seven groups he intended should have been, 1. Legions; 2. Tribes; 3. Classes; 4. Orders; 5. Genera; 6. Species; and 7, Varieties; but this change in his system he did not live to make. We are really

astonished at such puerilities, but not so much so at Linnæus for contriving them,-for such are incident to all systemmakers, as at critics who gravely defend them, and insist upon our adopting them, even now, as genuine discoveries in science. One of M. De Candolle's great discoveries is, that blossoms which were hitherto considered as formed of ONE PETAL, such as in the cowslip, hyacinth, and narcissus, are really formed of several petals, united so closely as to appear one. The great importance of this profound discovery is to facilitate the grouping of plants, as those which were formerly separated, on the supposition of their being polypetalous, are now brought into a proper neighbourhood, such as Kalmia and clethra; rhodora and the azaleas, called cleodora. Similar to this discovery is another of the same stamp, equally profound, by M. Correa de Serra, that sometimes a style or stigma, apparently simple, is really formed of two closely connected. It would be worthy of the ingenuity of these minute, hair-splitting botanists to reverse this fancy, and try to prove that the division of petals and of styles is a mere deception, since they are all united, or as if united, at their insertions or outgoings. These two latter terms, however, must be very cautiously used, for it seems the branches of a tree are not really a continuation of the main stem, but arise from inserted buds; while the various parts of a flower are not inserted, but are pushed out from those underneath.

The TERMS used in describing plants are now become so infinitely multiplied, as to look most forbiddingly repulsive to beginners. We have to thank M. Sprengel for discarding from his work a great number of such as were useless to all who have a competent knowledge of Latin. M.Richard, Cassini, and even Decandolle, however, have so multiplied new terms, for every slight variation in the organs and appendages, that their works are often totally unintelligible without a glossary. Such a glossary, indeed, ought to be prefixed to every work of this kind; M. Richard's on the orchideæ, for example, as it cannot be expected that the elementary works can furnish this, when every day adds some new term, or rejects an old one. Sprengel has most judiciously omitted a whole host of such innovations. Those who relish such things, will be amply gratified by turning to the ponderous work of Mr. Gray. M.Sprengel says nothing of Decandolle's nucula,-gamopetala,-haustoria,-lecus,-spongiolæ ; nor of M. Correa de Serra's chorda pistillaris,-stigmata radicum, and induviæ; nor of Link's alabastrum; nor of Willdenow's ascidium and ochrea; nor of a thousand others, which would only have lumbered his book. He very properly leaves the explanation of these to the inventors. Sprengel himself is

an inventor in a small way, and, among other things, claims the distinguished honour of having called by the name of dichogamy the circumstance of males and females coming at different periods to maturity. The fact of this precedence in growth is well worth remark, and has been ingeniously supposed to be one of the causes of multiplying species.

It is a law, repeated in all the books, that no new word should be compounded both of Latin and Greek, such as terminology, and the like; but those who stickle most for such a law, transgress it in almost every term which they use,giving us, what is worse than a compound of Greek and Latin,. a compound of Greek and German, and Greek and English, Taxonomie, for example, and Taxonomy, instead of Taxonomia. At present we must take leave of Botany, though we hope soon to have an opportunity of taking up the subject of MEDICAL BOTANY, in reference to the knowledge of it which is re quired for obtaining professional titles. We have before us also no fewer than three late works severally by Sir J. E. Smith, -Dr. Hooker, and Mr. Gray, which we intend to review together, and give our readers a fair estimate of their value and

accuracy.

HISTORY AND PRINCIPLES OF THE CONTRA-STIMULANT TREATMENT FOLLOWED IN ITALY BY RASORI, BORDA, TOMMASINI, MANTOVANI, FANZAGO, AND OTHERS.*

If these books had been the records of mere theory, we should have read them to amuse an idle hour, as we read a romance; but we should never have taken the trouble to review

Storia della Febre Petecchiale di Genova. Del Profess. Giovanni Raseri. Prima Lineæ, &c. Auctore, Syrus Borda.

'Dell' Infiammazione e della Febré continna: considerazioni PatologicoPratiche. Di G. Tommasini. Svo Pisa, 1820.

Del Metodo di Curare, &c. Discorso pronunciato nella Clinica Medica della Pontificia Universita di Bologna. Del Profes. Giacomo Tommasini. Bologna,

1821.

Lezioni di Terapia speciale sulle Infiammazioni, e Rendiconto Clinico, Di V. Mantovani. 12mo. Pavia, 1820.

Institutiones Pathologice. Auctore F. A. Fanzago.

them, and tantalize our readers with useless fancies in the very place where they are looking for practical facts. This is not the case, though it has been so represented; for these works are full of interesting practice and ingenious experiment.

The Italian school claims for its founders the high praise of originality, and, what is more of success, in the treatment of diseases which were formerly ill understood, and of course mistreated. Nothing, indeed, is easier than to become original, provided that facts are not admitted to interfere with speculation; but he who is always ready to contradict others, cannot, we imagine, have any fixed opinion of his own; and his original views can be nothing more than common-place notions, reversed or transposed. Genuine originality, however, is a very different thing. It is only found occasionally to be in opposition to received and established opinion, by shaking off the fetters of prejudice and misconception; and by observing facts and circumstances in other aspects and relations, than those in which they have been formerly viewed, and in this manner truth is arrived at by a new and untrodden path. Whether Rasori, Borda, and their followers, have succeeded in their experiments and speculations, we shall be better able to judge after we have taken a survey of the events which led them to alter their former opinions, and of the principles which they now follow."

Rasori, the founder of this infant school, was educated at Edinburgh, at the period when the learning and ingenuity of Darwin had given a fresh impulse to the simple and ingenious, but inaccurate doctrines of Brown; and on his return to Italy he published an able translation of the celebrated Zoonomia, with notes, containing the first germ of the principles which he and his colleagues have since formed into the outline of a system. Even as early as 1796 he taught many of his doctrines in his lectures at Pavia. His scepticism in this early period of his career was only founded on a narrow induction; but having an opportunity of studying the petechial fever, which raged in Genoa during the blockade of 1800, his scepticism in the doctrine of Brown and Darwin was confirmed by assiduous and accurate observations at the bedside, and by numerous dissections. The Genoese epidemic appeared to arise from a deficient supply of provisions, which were also of indifferent quality, and perhaps from the prevalence of depressing passions, or from some unknown change in the air. It had altogether the precise character of what Brown called an asthenic disease, or one arising from debilitating causes; and agreeably to this view all the physicians in Genoa prescribed stimulants, and of Course either greatly injured or killed their patients.

It was not new, indeed, among practitioners, to observe scarlatina terminating in dropsy, and to see dropsy cured by the detraction of blood, of which several instances, among others, are mentioned by the celebrated Frank, in the preface to his son's work, "Ratio Instituti Clinici Ticinensis." It was new, however, to detract blood, and use other active measures of depletion, in the class of fevers indiscriminately called typhus. Rasori was aware that some German physicians were prescribing dilute sulphuric acid in typhus, under the idea that the oxygen of the acid, neutralized the morbid accumulation of carbon and hydrogen in the system; but with all due respect for chemistry, he could not consider the stomach and blood-vessels to be like retorts and glass tubes, though he agreed with all his predecessors, that acids and sub-acids were refreshing, cooling, and sedative. But these same antiphlogistic sedatives were often prescribed with camphor, opium, ether, and wine, whose effect is directly contrary, and of course the one medicine counteracted the other. (See Quart. Jour. of For. Med. IV. 122.)

By thus observing the symptoms and course of the petechial fever, and the operation and effects of these opposite classes of medicines, Rasori was led to consider it not a disease of debility, but of an inflammatory nature, and he suspected dropsy to be also inflammatory, a suspicion which in this country has been advocated by Blackall, Abercrombie, and others. He says in the singular language of Brown, that both typhus and dropsy re sthenic; and further, he states that the excitement is not only the result of the stimulating action on the excitability, but that it is the compound result of stimulating and contra-stimulating actions; and that the diathesis in disease is merely the state of the excitability, together with the extension and degree of the morbid excitement. He still adhered, however, and does adhere, in all this, to the apparently absurd doctrine of Brown, that life is a state of perpetual warfare, as Gelmetti expresses it, between the excitable solids and the exciting fluids, and health a state of equipoise, in which neither of these predominates. Diseases again are either organic, hypersthenic, or hyposthenic. These theoretical views we leave to the musings of poetical physicians-it is with practical facts that we are concerned.

Rasori taking opium as a decided stimulant, began jointly with Borda, to try along with it some of the more powerful medicines of an opposite class, such as the preparations of antimony and mercury, and he was not disappointed in his anticipations of their action, namely, that they neutralized each other because the opium stimulates, and the antimony and