ARTIFICIAL SYSTEMS 307 



other genera that might be mentioned. Crude as this ar- 

 rangement was, it afforded for many generations the best 

 general classification of plants that anyone had to offer; and 

 it was not until after the revival of learning in Europe, dur- 

 ing the sixteenth century, that any important efforts were 

 made to find a better waj'. 



84. Artificial systems. An attempt was made to over- 

 come the above objection regarding unnatural separation 

 of sorts much alike, by calling the larger shrubs, trees, and 

 the smaller ones, herbs, thus doing away altogether with 

 the intermediate division. This, of course, lessened the 

 difficulty in a way, but can hardly be sai'd to have removed 

 it. To make smaller groups, these two were again subdivided 

 according to differences observed in this or that part. Thus, 

 some writers made subdivisions according to the shape or 

 arrangement of the leaves; others according to the form of 

 the fruit or seeds; others still, according to peculiarities of 

 some part of the flower; and so on, each writer basing his 

 system upon characters taken from one or two parts. Many 

 attempts of this sort were made during the next two centuries. 



Some of these systems were decided improvements over 

 the earlier classification, but even the most elaborate of 

 them had the same fundamental weakness already pointed 

 out in the arrangement according to size. We know that 

 plants which chffer a good deal as regards a single part may 

 be very much alike in all other respects, while plants much 

 alike in a certain part may be otherwise very different from 

 one another. For example, the fruits of the almond and the 

 peach differ much in appearance when ripe, but otherwise 

 an almond-tree and a peach-tree are almost exactly alike. 

 On the other hand, the root of the beet and of the turnip are 

 often of exactly the same shape, while the plants are strik- 

 ingly different in all other respects. It is plain, therefore, 

 that any arrangement of plants based upon a single character 

 or very limited set of peculiarities, is bound to be unsatis- 

 factory, because it cannot accomplish the chief purpose of 

 a classification, namely, to group nearest together the sorts 

 that are most alike. In a word, these systems failed chiefly 

 because they are artificial, and so not well calculated to ex- 



