JOSEPH PITTON DE TOURNEFORT[25] (1656-1708) founded his system also on the form of the corolla, but his views are to some extent opposed to those of Bachmann. While the latter was pre-eminently critical and deficient in knowledge of species, Tournefort was more inclined to dogmatise, and atoned in the eyes of his contemporaries for want of morphological insight by his extensive acquaintance with individual plants. He is commonly regarded as the founder of genera in the vegetable kingdom; but it has been already shown that the conceptions of genera and species had been framed as early as the 16th century from the describing of plants, and that Kaspar Bauhin also, in naming his plants, consistently distinguished genera and species; moreover Bachmann in 1690 had supported the claims of the binary nomenclature as the most suitable for the designation of plants, though he did not himself adopt it; Tournefort did adopt it, but in an entirely different way from that of Bauhin. Bauhin gave only the name of the genus, and supplied the species with characters; Tournefort, on the other hand, provided his genera with names and characters, and added the species and varieties without special description. Tournefort therefore was not the first who established genera; he merely transferred the centre of gravity, so to speak, in descriptive botany to the definition of the genera; but in doing so he committed the great fault of treating specific differences within the genus as a matter of secondary importance. How little depth there was in his botanical ideas may be seen not only from his very poor theory of the flower, the imperfections in which, as in the case of Bachmann, are the more remarkable, since he founded his system on the outward form of the flower, but still more from the expression which he uses at the end of his history of botany, a work otherwise of considerable merit; he says there that the science of botany has been so far advanced since the age of Hippocrates, that hardly anything is still wanting except an exact establishing of genera. His general propositions on the subject of systematic botany, together with much that is good, but which is generally not new and is better expressed in the works of Morison, Ray, and Bachmann, contain strange misconceptions; for instance, he classes plants which have no flower and fruit with those in which these parts are to be seen only with the microscope, that is, the smallness of the organs is equivalent to their absence. It may seem strange that his theory of the flower should be so imperfect, when the excellent investigations of Malpighi and Grew into the structure of flowers, fruit, and seed were already before the world (1700), and Rudolph Jacob Camerarius had made known his discovery of sexuality in the vegetable kingdom. This doctrine, however, Tournefort expressly refused to admit. But the reproach of neglecting the labours of Malpighi and Grew is