BOTANIC MATERIA MEDICA, 13 
HOW PLANTS ARE DIVIDED 
AND WHAT SYSTEMS ARE USED IN THEIR 
CLASSIFICATION. 
Botany is divided into two systems of classi- 
fication, the artificial and natural. For the 
first system we are indebted to the French 
botanist, Tournefort, who made an_ artificial 
classification of the vegetable world by the 
‘character of their flowers, which was mainly 
based upon the arrangement of the corolla. 
Following him, the celebrated Swede, Carolus 
Linnzus, introduced an improvement in the 
classification of the Tournefort method, by 
founding the classes and orders on _ the 
_ position and number of the stamens and pistils. 
_ This system was perfect until by cultivation 
and climate the flower was so changed as to be 
no longer recognizable; stamens had become 
_ petals and petals had become stamens. There- 
fore, the artificial classification is only used for 
reference, as a kind of key to the natural sys- 
tem of botany. 
The natural system classifies plants accord- 
ing to their resemblance in every particular; 
those plants which bear the strongest likeness 
_to each other form classes; those next in order go 
