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SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



history waited for the schools and the school-trained botanists. 

 They have made their own botany, have established both system 

 and nomenclature; and these, in so far as they had proceeded, the 

 professionals when they came upon the scene adopted. The two, 

 that of rustic, of mountaineer, of herdsman, and of woodsman, and 

 that of the schools, are as essentially one botany, as certainly one 

 in kind, as wild pears, wild apples, and wild grapes are respectively 

 one in kind with their cultivated and improved offspring of the 

 orchards and vineyards. If this be true, then the annals of 

 botanical science have another beginning than that which our 

 annalists have assigned it. 



When once it is seen that group names for plants are as old as 

 language, and that these very names establish it that men always 

 in all ages classified the many plants with which they had to do, 

 there is another matter which immediately calls for careful in- 

 vestigation, that is, the parts of the plants to which rude primeval 

 botanists looked for the marks by which to range their plants in 

 convenient groups. We have already seen that Adanson alone 

 among historians perceived that attempts had been made down 

 through all the centuries to group plants by other data than those 

 of flower and fruit. In bringing this fact into view, and by citing 

 a long line of early authors in attestation of it, he was fearlessly 

 contradicting, and at the same time successfully controverting 

 what his contemporary, Linnaeus, had said when in the warmth 

 of his zeal for the great Cesalpino he had pronounced him first 

 in the order of time among real systematists. ^ The truth about 

 Cesalpino was simply this, that he had been the first to attempt 

 an orderly arrangement of the plant world by universal appeal to 

 the fruit and seed ; and that alone would still have been the super- 

 lative of praise, doubtless well merited. But that the Cesal- 

 pinian system seemed incomparably superior to every one that had 

 preceded it could never become a warrant for saying that those 

 systems antedating it might be left out of view altogether, as never 

 having been systems at all. I can conceive of nothing which 

 science more inflexibly exacts of every scientific man than truth- 

 fulness. She cannot permit an enthusiastic fancy to take the 

 place of fact. But there have been successive generations of 

 botanists since Linnaeus who, as if swearing by his authority as if 

 he had been infallible, have seemed to have no idea that any plant 

 classifying ever was attempted upon any other than that antho- 

 carpological basis which now for some three centuries has been 



' Linnaeus, Philosophia Botanica, § 54. 



