EARLY NOTIONS. 43 



unfamiliar with the study of plants, and they 

 were not hit upon by the early botanists. 

 The characters employed by the early herb- 

 alists and botanists in making their classifi- 

 cations illustrate the extent of the knowl- 

 edge of plants at the time, and a compari- 

 son of successive methods of classification 

 indicates the advancement in such knowl- 

 edge. For instance, upon being told that 

 Dioscorides in the first century divided 

 plants into aromatic, alimentary, medicinal, 

 and vinous, one is at once impressed with 

 the thought that Dioscorides studied plants 

 from a medicinal point of view, and that he 

 understood their medicinal characters better 

 than any other features. A very early clas- 

 sification, and one which denotes a superfi- 

 cial knowledge of plants, was that which rec- 

 ognized the three divisions of trees, shrubs, 

 and herbs, and this classification was not en- 

 tirely dispelled until Linnaeus rejected it in 

 the middle of last century. It is strange 

 that the forms of flowers did not earlier at- 

 tract attention. Fuchs, a studious German 

 whose botanical labors are appropriately 

 commemorated in the name Fuchsia, was 

 perhaps the first to define any of the parts 

 of the flower. He called the anthers the 



