FOUNDATIONS OF MORPHOLOGY 27 



The Foundations of Plant Morphology and Anatomy 



A matter of forty years or thereabouts elapsed after 

 the date of Caesalpino's treatise before the two brothers 

 John and Kaspar Bauhin appeared on the botanical 

 stage. The latter is by far the more important figure and 

 his fame rests chiefly on two works which were pubUshed 

 in 1620 and 1623. The earlier treatise was known as the 

 Prodromus Theatri Botanici and the later as the Pinax. 

 In the Pinax Bauhin quite definitely throws overboard 

 the alphabetical arrangement of plants, and announces 

 that any sound system of taxonomy must be founded on 

 natural affinities. One of the first essentials was obviously 

 to have a uniform method of naming plants, and to clear 

 up once and for all the hopeless confusion caused by the 

 careless use of synonyms. Plants in those days were 

 provided with long descriptive sentences by way of 

 names, much as if we were to employ the diagnoses in 

 Hooker's Flora instead of saying simply Ranunculus acris 

 or Caltha palustris. Bauhin was not perhaps always 

 very successful in his efforts, but he certainly got the 

 length of recognising the importance of using only two 

 names to indicate the plant under consideration, and he 

 did much to bring into general use the system of binomial 

 nomenclature with which we are now so familiar. But 

 if Bauhin distinguished genus and species and gave his 

 plants christian names and surnames, so to speak, he made 

 Httle or no progress in grouping genera into larger associa- 

 tions, or, as we would say, into orders and classes. 



I must mention one other contemporary of Bauhin, 

 viz. Jung, although his writings were not pubhshed till 

 many years after his death. He made no attempt at 

 founding a natural system, but devoted himself rather to 

 working out such morphological problems as might serve 

 as a basis for such a system. He has been described as 

 a philosopher of the type of Caesalpino, but without 

 Aristotelian obsessions, a close observer of nature as well 



