140 Plant Classification [ch. 



however, really essential. In the preface to the 'Phyto- 

 pinax' (1596) Bauhin states that, for the sake of clearness, 

 he has applied one name to each plant and added also some 

 easily recognisable character 1 . 



The binomial method was foreshadowed at a very early 

 date, for in a fifteenth -century manuscript of the old herbal 

 'Circa instans,' to which we have referred on p. 24, this 

 system prevails to a remarkable extent. 



When we turn to those general schemes of classification 

 which were evolved by the herbalists of the sixteenth 

 century, we are at once struck by the great difference 

 existing between the principles on which these schemes are 

 based, and those at which we have arrived at the present 

 day. To classify plants according to their uses and 

 medicinal properties is obviously the first suggestion that 

 arises, when the universe is regarded from a simple, 

 anthropocentric standpoint. In the Grete Herball of 1526 

 we get a ludicrously clear example of this method, applied 

 to the special case of the Fungi. " Fungi ben mussherons. 

 ...There be two maners of them, one maner is deedly and 

 sleeth [slayeth] them that eateth of them and be called tode 

 stoles, and the other dooth not." This account of the 

 Fungi occurs also in the earlier manuscript herbal, 'Circa 

 instans,' mentioned in the last paragraph. 



This theory of classification has been shown in more 

 recent times to contain the germ of something more nearly 

 approaching a natural system than one would imagine at 

 first sight. Both Linnaeus and de Jussieu have pointed 

 out that related plants have similar properties, and, in 1804, 

 A. P. de Candolle, in his ' Essai sur les proprietes medicales 

 des Plantes, comparees avec leurs formes exterieures et leur 

 classification naturelle,' carried the argument much further. 

 He showed that in no less than twenty-one families of 

 flowering plants, the same medicinal properties were found 

 throughout all the members of the order. This is very 

 remarkable, when we remember that the state of knowledge 

 at that time was such that de Candolle was obliged to 

 dismiss a large number of orders with the words "properties 

 unknown." Quite recently the subject of the differentiation 



1 "plerisque nomen imposuimus, perspicuitatis gratia, cuius nomine com- 

 muniter nota aliqua quae a quolibet in planta observari potest, nomini addita." 



