r 





1 



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^^%hm% of (Jiflssifiration. 



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•as that first invented a system of classification of 



i uncertain. Since the days when Solomon, king of 



Israel, "spake of trees from the Cedar tree that is in 



Lebanon even unto the Hyssop that springeth out of the 



wall;" or those of Zoroaster, who is said to have taught 



that the primeval creative power called forth from the blood 



of the sacred Isiiill 120,000 forms of plants; or earlier 



if the reader wishes, since the time when primitive 



began first to observe and \\ undci at liis surroundings, 



the present hour, the glory of the vegetable creation 



necessarily excited his admiration. The Chaldaean 



t'i ^H' ' '•' shepherds, who are credited with the discovery of astron- 



£] SK' " ■ '""yj through their undisturbed contemplation of the 



" -^"V ' " tlowers of heaven," could not have been entirely unmind- 



• > till of the " stars of earth, the beautiful flowers." 

 74-266), a Greek philosopher and pupil of Aristotle, wrote a 

 "History of Plants," and a work "On the Causes of Plants," which evince not a little 

 knowledge of the organs and physiology thereof. Pliny the Elder (a. d. 23-79), in his 

 great compilation, the " Thirty-seven Books of Histories of Nature," gives many curious 

 bits of information in reference to about one thousand plants. Dioscorides, who flourished 

 about one hundred years later, described five hundred plants; and his work is lemarkable 

 as being the source of much of the terminology still used in our hooks on floriculture. 



Scientific botany, however, owes its rise to the revival of letters in the ■-ixteenth 

 century. Otto Brunfels (1464-1534) is considered the first among the moderns to attempt 

 a classification of plants. Andrea Cesalpino {1519-1603), Italian physician and botanist, 

 was perhaps the first to establish a natural svstem of classification. Robert Morison 

 (1620-S3), a Scottish physician and botanist, separated plants into woody and herbaceous, 

 and divided them into eighteen classes. John Ray (1628-1705), English botanist, sepa- 

 rated flowering from flowerless plants, and subdivided the former into monocotyledonous 

 and dicotyledonous plants. A. Q. Rivinus (1653-1723), a Saxon anatomist and botanist, 

 published, in 1690, a system based on the differences of the corolla. J. P. de Tournefort 

 (1656- 1 708), French botanist, described about eight thousand species in twenty-two classes, 

 the classification being based mainly on the differences in the corolla. 



4'3 



