affinities, and Goethe’s doctrine of metamorphosis contributed not a little to increase the confusion. These historical phenomena will be further considered in the following chapter; at present we are more concerned to show how the professed systematists pursued the path opened by De Candolle and Brown. And here it must be noticed that from about the year 1830, in Germany especially, morphological enquiry became separated as a special subject from systematic botany; it became more and more the fashion to treat the latter as independent of morphology, and thus to forsake the source of deeper insight which comparative and genetic morphology alone can open to the systematist; morphology on the other hand took a new flight, and as it thus developed itself apart from pure systematic botany, its progress must be described by itself in a later portion of this history. If advance in systematic botany depended on the number of systems that were proposed from 1825 to 1845, that period must be looked upon as its golden age; no less than twenty-four systems made their appearance during these twenty years, without counting those which were inspired by the views of the nature-philosophy. There was great and spreading growth, but no corresponding depth; no really new points of view were opened for classification, and as regards the true principles of the natural system there were symptoms of evident decline rather than of advance, as will be shown below. Improvements were effected certainly in the details of the system, since botanists generally adhered to the principles laid down by De Candolle, Jussieu, and Brown. Families were cleared up and better defined, and groups of families were proposed which assumed more and more the appearance of natural cycles of relationship. The class more especially treated was the extensive one of the Dicotyledons, in which the families, continually growing more and more numerous, were in Jussieu’s arrangement a chaos, but had been united into larger groups in a somewhat artificial manner by De Candolle. Here we see once more how the formation of the system rises step by step from the particular to the more general; at an earlier period genera were constructed out of species, and families out of genera, and during the years from 1820 to 1845 the families were united into more comprehensive groups; but these orders or classes were not yet grouped together in such a manner as to ensure the separation of the largest divisions of the vegetable kingdom in a natural manner. The great class of Dicotyledons is not even yet so arranged that the smaller aggregates of families connect satisfactorily one with another. Nevertheless a considerable advance was made by the establishment of a large number of smaller groups of families, and Bartling and Endlicher were especially successful in founding such groups and supplying them with names and characters.