 de Candolle 's first books , Plantarum historia succulentarum ( 4 vols . , 1799 ) and Astragalogia ( 1802 ) , brought him to the notice of Georges Cuvier and Jean @-@ Baptiste Lamarck. de Candolle , with Cuvier 's approval , acted as deputy at the Collège de France in 1802 . Lamarck entrusted him with the publication of the third edition of the Flore française ( 1803 – 1815 ) , and in the introduction entitled Principes élémentaires de botanique , de Candolle proposed a natural method of plant classification as opposed to the artificial Linnaean method . The premise of de Candolle 's method is that taxa do not fall along a linear scale ; they are discrete , not continuous . 
