CHAP, ii.] -from Cesalpino to Linnaeus. 57 



the sterile plants are termed male, the fruitful female. Thus 

 he distinguished the cases which we now call dioecious from 

 the previously mentioned monoecious plants, among which he 

 reckons the maize. 



All this may serve to give the reader some idea, though a 

 very incomplete one, of Cesalpino's theory ; to do him justice, 

 it would be necessary to give a full account of his very numerous, 

 accurate, and often acute observations on the position of leaves, 

 the formation of fruit, the distribution of seeds and their posi- 

 tion in the fruit, of his comparative observations on the parts 

 of the fruit in different plants^ and above all of his very excel- 

 lent description of plants with tendrils and climbing plants, of 

 those that are armed with thorns and the like. Though there 

 is naturally much that is erroneous and inexact in his accounts, 

 yet we have before us in the chapters on these subjects the first 

 beginning of a comparative morphology, which quite casts into 

 the shade all that Aristotle and Theophrastus have said on the 

 subject. But the most brilliant portions of his general botany 

 are contained in the i2th, i3th, and i4th chapters, in which he 

 gives the outlines of his views on the systematic arrangement 

 of plants ; to prepare the way for what is to follow, he shows 

 first that it is better to give up the four old divisions of the 

 vegetable kingdom, and to unite the shrubs with the trees and 

 the undershrubs with the herbs. But how these genera are to 

 be distinguished into species is, he says, hard to conceive, for 

 the multitude of plants is almost innumerable ; there must be 

 many intermediate genera containing the ' ultimae species,' but 

 few are as yet known. He then turns to the divisions founded 

 on the relations of plants to men. Such groups, he says, as 

 vegetables and kinds of grain, which are put together under the 

 name of ' fruges ' and kitchen-herbs (' olera '), are formed more 

 from the use made of them than from the resemblance of form, 

 which we require ; and he shows this by good examples. The 

 discerning of plants, he continues, is very difficult, for so long 

 as the genera (larger groups) are undetermined, the species must 



