26 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS V DL. 54 



all along is largely identifiable with the advancement that has been 

 made in the knowledge of plant organs; yet it is just this which one 

 is able to learn least about from the historians. This statement 

 must be qualified by the admission that, as regards that sudden leap 

 forward which anthology made early in the eighteenth century, 

 Sprengel is quite explicit ; though he gives little indeed of its earlier 

 history. It is also acknowledged that the story of the rise of 

 microscopic organology, and its progress down to the middle of the 

 nineteenth century was given by Sachs, and with. such fulness as 

 to make it occupy more than half his entire volume of the History 

 of Botany. Still these are but separate and disconnected chapters 

 in the real history of organology. 



If I here indicate this incompleteness of the history of botany as 

 hitherto presented, it is not because I dare hope in these land- 

 mark chapters to make good the deficiency, though earnest and 

 laborious effort is made to show how I think it may be done. 



That prehistorically and prime vally there existed not only an 

 organology of plants but also a classification of the familiar kinds 

 has already been suggested; and the proposition may here receive 

 clearer statement. Moreover, certain somewhat stilted and pedan- 

 tic views rather widely prevalent respecting systematic botany as 

 of recent origin, no less than the interests of a truer philosophy of 

 botanical history, seem to call for a vindication of this thesis. 



Owing to the profusion of plant individuals on the face of 

 the earth everywhere, the bewildering diversity of their forms, 

 and the usefulness of them to man, it was never possible for 

 men, at whatever stage of mental development, to intercom- 

 municate concerning plants without having group names for 

 them. "Words that should have application to particular as- 

 semblages or kinds of plants were among the earlier necessities 

 of language; and to speak of plants under group names is nothing 

 less than to speak of them as already classified. The classification 

 has necessarily preceded the invention, and the adoption into 

 language, of the collective name. By way of illustration I select 

 out of a hundred or two of plant names which in our English speech 

 are as old as the language itself, the word "clover." It tells its own 

 story. It was applied to certain plants which were seen to have 

 this common characteristic, that each leaf was made up of — cloven 

 into — three separate equal and in every way consimilar leaves. 

 I say leaves in order to avoid being anachronistic ; because leaflet is a 

 term of really very modern invention; one unknown in English, and 

 without its equivalent in any other language, at least of Europe, 



