26 Botanists of Germany and the Netherlands [Book. i. 



and characters. Together with these smaller groups, many 

 more comprehensive ones, which we now designate families, 

 were also marked off and supplied with names, which are still 

 in use. The 16th century established the groups and names 

 of Coniferae, Umbelliferae, Verticillatae (Labiatae), Capillares 

 (Ferns), and others. It is true that the determination of the 

 limits of these groups by distinct marks was not yet attempted, 

 but the plants belonging to these groups were again and again 

 treated of in special chapters or ranged in due succession one 

 after another. But as long as this was done to some extent 

 without design, and the real meaning of this relationship was 

 not yet recognised, other considerations of very various kinds 

 influenced the composition of the books and disturbed the 

 natural arrangement. The feeling for natural affinity supplants 

 all other considerations in de l'Obel first, and after him much 

 more completely in Kaspar Bauhin. 



Enough perhaps has now been said to render the main 

 result of the botanical efforts of the period, which we are 

 considering, intelligible to the reader ; but a clear view of the 

 method of describing plants at that time, and of the way in 

 which systematic botany came into being, can only be shown 

 by examples ; and if we proceed to give some here, it is with 

 the purpose with which figures copied as exactly as possible 

 from nature are added to treatises on natural history, because 

 a real understanding is only to be gained in this way. The 

 botanical literature of the 16th century is so different from that 

 of the 19th, that a very indistinct idea of it could be obtained 

 from a statement of results expressed in modern terms. 



Fuchs, Historia Stirpium, 1542. 

 The common plant now known as Convolvulus arvensis is 

 there called Helxine cissampelos, and is described in the 

 following manner : 



1 Nomina. — 'Elgivrj KLvo-dfineXos Graecis, Helxine cissampelus 

 et Convolvulus Latinis nominatur. Vulgus herbariorum et 



