LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE I 7 



briefly and in chronological succession more than sixty leading au- 

 thors, beginning with Theophrastus and ending with some who 

 have been contemporary with himself in the middle of the eigh- 

 teenth century. Assuming that these analyses are correct, one may 

 read connectedly, with small sacrifice of time and as it were step 

 by step the progress which, up to Adanson's time, had been made 

 in the grouping of genera into families — or whatever else one may 

 choose to call such groups; and, while it will be regarded an im- 

 portant one among several threads that the philosophical and im- 

 partial historian is bound to follow I know not who besides Adanson 

 has ever attempted to trace this one except for a very short distance.* 



And the next thread of botanical story which Adanson picks 

 up and follows is one that lies close alongside the aforementioned. 

 The earlier endeavors to indicate groups of genera were made an- 

 teriorly to the time when structure of flower and fruit had come 

 to be accepted as the guide. By what marks did those pioneers of 

 classification guide themselves in their attempted groupings? By 

 way of answer I give a short selection from Adanson's own more 

 detailed report of the matter. Lobel (1570), he says was guided 

 by general resemblances, size, qualities, and uses; Porta (1588), by 

 ecology, forms of roots, of leaves, and vegetative organs generally; 

 J. Bauhin (1650), has 40 classes, by appeal to all organs, as well 

 as to properties of plants and their ecology; Rivinus (1690), in- 

 florescence, calyx, and corolla; Boerhaave (17 10), general aspects, 

 ecology, leaves, fruits; Haller (1742), cotyledons, calyx, corolla, 

 stamens, seeds; Gleditsch (1749), flowers, insertion of stamens; and 

 so on through a list of some sixty writers, each a celebrity in his 

 day as the author of some new attempt at system in botany. ^ Of 

 a situation like this, and one so necessary to be brought forward in 

 any history of the science, Sachs knewnothing, neither even Sprengel. 



There is another outlook upon the progress of botany that is 

 almost peculiarly Adanson's. At the beginning of the analysis of 

 each author's treatise he notifies us how many different kinds of 

 plants each man knew, or had under discussion in his book — Theo- 

 phrastus 500, Hermann 5600, Toumefort 10,146, Ray 18,655, as 

 examples — thus recognizing at every step the important considera- 

 tion that, other things being equal, the greater the number of plant 



' Linnaeus in his Classes Plantarum accomplished this admirably for 'a 

 very limited period, that is, for the time between 1583 and 1738; only a small 

 fraction of the time dtiring which the idea of classes, or families, had been 

 in the minds of botanists and found more or less distinct expression. 



2 Adanson, Families, vol. i, pp. Ixxxix-xciii, 



