54 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



niiniber depending somewhat on the topography of the 

 place. In beginning, however, the student is usually far more 

 interested in finding out the names of his specimens than he 

 is in tracing their ranges or ascertaining their exact number. 

 Without a name one is helpless, unable to indicate his plant 

 intelligibly to his friends or to look up its history in the books. 

 He may, it is true, make a pretty close guess at its indentity 

 from its resemblances to some better known plant, but even 

 here appearances are often deceptive and he still lacks that 

 exactness of identification so dear to the hearts of all real 

 plant students. 



In such a dilemma, he finds himself in a position to 

 sympathize with those early botanists who with only the 

 crudest of books at hand were confronted, not only with a 

 host of strange plants, but with a multitude without names 

 at all. The way in which they evolved order out of this 

 chaos makes a most interesting chapter in botany but can be 

 only touched upon here. At first tlie best scheme that could 

 be thought of was to describe the species as carefully as might 

 be but this left no way of mentioning them except by the use 

 of this series of descriptive terms. It was the Swedish bot- 

 anist Linnaeus who devised the scheme of giving each plant 

 a name of only two words, the first standing for the group 

 to which it belongs and the second its own specific name. 



All this, however, presupposes some idea of relationship 

 among plants for until such ideas existed there could not be a 

 group name. The idea that plants are really related and that 

 their resemblances are not purely fortuitous, came very slowly; 

 in fact external appearances were first relied upon to indicate 

 relationship and it was a long time before the flower was 

 recognized at the least changing of plant parts and therefore 

 likely to give the most satisfactory characters for grouping 



