14 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



fiowerless ones of a single county, or of the watershed of any 

 lake or stream, every such laborer contributes to the stock of 

 botanical knowledge, and this without reference to personal con- 

 prehensiveness of botanical view, or a looking to far off ultimate 

 ends. 



Upon the historian of botany, however, it seems to devolve 

 that he shall have some forecast of what botany in its perfection 

 as a science shall be like; for in practice he sits in judgment on 

 each epoch and decides whether as an epoch its tendency was more 

 to the advancement of the science than to its retardation; from 

 which kind of procedure it becomes certain that some ideal of 

 perfection is in his mind. Every writer on botanical history must 

 have his philosophy of that history, unless he content himself 

 and hope to satisfy his readers with disconnected historic frag- 

 ments. 



It may be useful to survey in this connection, though with the 

 utmost brevity, the methods of several representative historians 

 of botany. 



Tournefort (1700), eminent among even the greatest promoters 

 of botany, was also its historian. The first fifty pages of his 

 Institutiones 1 are occupied with an abridged history of the science 

 during two thousand years preceding his own date. The history 

 is prefaced by a definition. There are two parts to botany: the 

 knowledge of plants, and the knowledge of the uses (vertus) of 

 them. It is a distinguishing between systematic botany and 

 economic. He says the distinction must be carefully noted. He 

 denies to the properties or uses of plants any part in, or influence 

 upon, the systematizing of them. A systematized presentation 

 of the known facts constitutes the first beginning of every science. 

 There can be absolutely no botany at all without systematic 

 botany. These are Tournefort's ground principles. From them we 

 shall gather his philosophy of the advancement of botany. The 

 plant world can never come to be well known until sounder prin- 

 ciples of classification shall have been established, and the whole 

 aggregate of known plants shall have been grouped over again upon 

 those better principles. The long line of the most noted authors 

 before him had classified plants in all kinds of ways, some according 

 to characters of the roots, some by differences of stems and leaves, 

 one^by fruits alone, another by the qualities and uses of the plants; 

 another grouping them according to their places of growth, or 

 ecologically, as we now say. Seldom were the systems of any two 



1 Institutions Rei Herbaria, Paris, 1700. 



