A work such as Gärtner’s could scarcely find a fruitful soil in Germany, where some thirty years before even Koelreuter’s brilliant investigations had met with little sympathy, and Conrad Sprengel’s remarkable enquiries into the relations of the structure of the flower to the insect-world in 1793 failed to be understood; Gärtner complains in the second part, published in 1791, that not two hundred copies of the first volume were sold in three years. But the work, which forms an epoch in the history of botany, was better received in France, where the Academy placed it as second in the list of the productions which in later times had been most profitable to science; there lived the man who was able to measure the whole value of such a work—Antoine Laurent de Jussieu. But even in Germany, where plant-describing was comfortably flourishing, there were not altogether wanting men who knew how to estimate both the services of Gärtner and the importance of the natural system. First among these was August Johann Georg Karl Batsch, Professor in Jena from 1761 to 1802, who published in the latter year a ‘Tabula affinitatum regni vegetabilis,’ with characters of the groups and families. Kurt Sprengel, who was born in 1766, and died as Professor of Botany in Halle in 1833, contributed still more to the spread of clearer views respecting the real character of the natural system and the task of scientific botany generally by numerous works, and especially by his ‘Geschichte der Botanik,’ which appeared in 1817 and 1818. But even this highly gifted and accomplished man agreed with the Linnaean botanists in attributing an excessive value to the describing of plants, as is shown in his history, where to exalt the merits of the old botanists he gives figures of the plants first described by them. Meanwhile the meritorious efforts of these men were not in themselves capable of directly advancing the natural system, or of greatly increasing the number of its adherents in Germany, nor did it find general acceptance in that country till it had made considerable progress in the hands of the two foremost botanists of the time, De Candolle and Robert Brown.