136 Plant Classification [ch. 



plants which Albertus describes as growing "ex ligneis 

 tunicis." It seems clear from this expression that he 

 realised that there was an anatomical distinction between 

 Dicotyledons and Monocotyledons. 



Considering how much Albertus had achieved, it is 

 somewhat curious that Cesalpino, who represented Aristo- 

 telian botany in the sixteenth, as Albertus did in the 

 thirteenth century, should have produced so inadequate a 

 system as his own contribution to the subject. We owe to 

 him one marked advance, the recognition, namely, of the 

 importance of the seed. On the whole, however, his classi- 

 fication savours too much of having been thought out in 

 the study, and it suffers by comparison with other systems 

 of about the same period, such as those of de l'Obel and 

 Bauhin, which were arrived at rather by instinct, acting 

 upon observation, than by a definite and self-conscious 

 intellectual effort. 



Cesalpino makes his main distinction, on the old 

 Aristotelian plan, between Trees and Shrubs on the one 

 hand, and Undershrubs and Herbs on the other. He 

 divides the first of these groups into two, and the second 

 into thirteen classes, depending chiefly on seed and fruit 

 characters. Very few of these classes really represent 

 natural groups, and the chief of all distinctions among 

 Flowering Plants, that between Dicotyledons and Mono- 

 cotyledons, which was foreshadowed by Albertus, is almost 

 lost to sight. 



When we turn from the botanical philosophers to the 

 herbalists proper, we find an altogether different state of 

 affairs. The Aristotelian botanists were conscious, from 

 the beginning, of the philosophic necessity for some form 

 of classification. The medical botanists, on the other hand, 

 were only interested in plants as individuals, and were 

 driven to classify them merely because some sort of 

 arrangement was necessary for convenience in dealing with 

 a large number of kinds. The first Materia Medica, that 

 of Dioscorides, shows some attempt at order, but the 

 arrangement is seldom at all natural. Occasionally the 

 author groups together plants which are nearly related, as 

 when he treats of a number of Labiates, or of Umbellifers 

 successively — but this is rare. 



