Flower of _Oncidium abortivum_ 462
218. Bladder plum 464

INTRODUCTION.

Till within a comparatively recent period but little study was given to
exceptional formations. They were considered as monsters to be shunned,
as lawless deviations from the ordinary rule, unworthy the attention of
botanists, or at best as objects of mere curiosity. By those whose
notions of structure and conformation did not extend beyond the details
necessary to distinguish one species from another, or to describe the
salient features of a plant in technical language; whose acquaintance
with botanical science might almost be said to consist in the
conventional application of a number of arbitrary terms, or in the
recollection of a number of names, teratology was regarded as a chaos
whose meaningless confusion it were vain to attempt to render
intelligible,--as a barren field not worth the labour of tillage.

The older botanists, it is true, often made them the basis of satirical
allusions to the political or religious questions of the day, especially
about the time of the Reformation, and the artists drew largely upon
their polemical sympathies in their representations of these anomalies.
Linnaeus treated of them to some extent in his 'Philosophia,' but it is
mainly to Angustin Pyramus De Candolle that the credit is due of calling
attention to the importance of vegetable teratology. This great
botanist, not only indirectly, but from his personal research into the
nature of monstrosities, did more than any of his predecessors to rescue
them from the utter disregard, or at best the contemptuous indifference,
of the majority of botanists. De Candolle gave a special impetus to
morphology in general by giving in his adhesion to the morphological
hypotheses of Goethe. These were no mere figments of the poet's
imagination, as they were to a large extent based on the actual
investigation of normal and abnormal organisation by Goethe both alone,
and also in conjunction with Batsch and Jaeger.

De Candolle's example was contagious. Scarcely a botanist of any
eminence since his time but has contributed his quota to the records of
vegetable teratology, in proof of which the names of Humboldt, Robert
Brown, the De Jussieus, the Saint Hilaires, of Moquin-Tandon, of
Lindley, and many others, not to mention botanists still living, may be
cited. To students and amateurs t