and Tournefort; or Calycists, as Magnol--were not more successful, and that their systems, even the _Methodus emendata_ of Ray, were more or less artificial. It was in France that the carving out, as it were, of the Natural Orders from the solid block of genera was carried on with the greatest success. This process had become much less difficult since Tournefort had begun to constitute genera in the modern sense of the term. Before his time the word "genus" had been applied indiscriminately to every kind of plant-group (see the systems of Cesalpino and Ray, pp. 12, 32): the largest groups were the _summa genera_; the smaller, the _genera subalterna_ or _infima_. Tournefort limited the application of the term to the smallest groups of species, designating by the term _Classe_ the largest groups which he subdivided into _Sections_ (_Elemens de Botanique_, 1694). It was Linnaeus (_Classes Plantarum_, p. 485) who introduced the term _Ordo_ to designate the subordinate groups of the classes. Tournefort himself succeeded, by means of his corollist method, in distinguishing for the first time the following _Sections_, describing their flowers by terms which are now familiar as the names of natural orders; _Flore Labiato_, _Cruciformi_, _Rosaceo_, _Caryophyllaceo_, _Liliaceo_, _Papilionaceo_, _Amentaceo_; though these sections do not all exactly agree with the modern Natural Orders of similar designation. A remarkable, if not altogether successful, attempt in the same direction was Adanson's _Familles des Plantes_ (1763), based upon the sound Linnean principle, "_qu'il ne peut i avoir de Methode naturele en Botanicke, que celle qui considere l'ensemble de toutes les parties des Plantes_." The number of species and varieties known in his day amounted to something over eighteen thousand: these, reduced into 1615 genera, he grouped into fifty-eight families. Several of those had been already more or less well defined; but most of them were entirely original, and not a few of them persist to the present day, though Adanson is not credited with all that are his due. His lack of method in naming his families, to say nothing of the fantastic nomenclature of his genera, made it necessary for other names to be preferred to his. Still some familiar names of natural orders are attributable to him, such as _Hepaticae_, _Onagrae_, _Compositae_, _Caprifolia_, _Borragines_, _Portulacae_, _Amaranthi_, _Papavera_, _Cisti_, though most of them have since undergone some change in their termination. In addition to these, there are several which would have been credited to Adanson, had it not so happened that they had also been suggested by Bernard de Jussieu: such are, _Palmae_, _Aristolochiae_, _Myrti_, _Campanulae_, _Apocyna_, _Verbenae_, _Thymeleae_, _Gerania_, _Malvae_, _Ranunculi_. Adanson was the first to publish these names (1763): but Bernard de Jussieu had made use of them as early as 1759 in laying out the Trianon Garden at Versailles, though they were not