144 Plant Classification [ch. 



Among these eighteen groups, the only ones which 

 have any pretension to being natural are VI (Umbellifers) 

 and XIV (Thistles), and these merely approximate roughly 

 to related groups of genera. Among the Umbellifers we 

 meet with Achillea and other genera which do not really 

 belong to the order, whilst, with the Thistles, there are 

 grouped other spiny plants, such as Astragalus tragacantha, 

 which, in a natural system, would occupy a place remote 

 from the Composites. 



In spite of the fact that improved systems of classi- 

 fication, to which we shall shortly refer, were put forward 

 in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, we find 



Text-fig. 68. "Ninfea" = Waterlily [Durante, 

 Herbario Nuovo, 1585]. 



that, as late as 1640, John Parkinson in his well known 

 herbal, divided all the plants then known into seventeen 

 classes or tribes — the sequence in which these classes were 

 placed having, in most cases, no meaning at all. A few 

 of his tribes are natural, but many are valueless as an 

 expression of affinities. As an example we may mention 

 his third class, "Venemous, Sleepy, and Hurtfull Plants, 

 and their Counterpoysons," and his seventeenth, " Strange 

 and Outlandish Plants." In Parkinson's classification, we 

 see Botany reverting once more to the position of a mere 

 handmaid to Medicine. 



\ 



