LECTURE III 



THE FOUNDERS OF NATURAL CLASSIFICATION 



THE days of the herbalists with their catalogues of plants 

 arranged in alphabetical order or in groups according to 

 their medicinal and other " vertues " are now over, 

 and at last plants are studied for their own sakes and 

 not for what could be got out of them. A beginning 

 had been made by Bauhin in establishing a uniform 

 terminology, and morphology and anatomy had taught 

 the botanists of the later years of the seventeenth century 

 that it might be possible in time to evolve some sort of 

 classification that would express the family relationships 

 of the different genera and species to each other in a 

 natural way. 



One of the first to attempt such a classification was 

 Robert Morison, whose chief work, the Historia Plantamm 

 Universalis Oxoniensis, appeared in its complete form in 

 1680, when its author held the Chair of Botany in Oxford 

 University. It would take far too much of our time to 

 go into Morison's system in detail ; moreover we shall 

 find many of his ideas reappearing in the work of his 

 greater contemporary Ray. Morison, strange to say, 

 follows the old method of dividing plants into herbs, 

 shrubs, and trees, subdividing these larger groups into 

 sections based on the most varied features, some morpho- 

 logical, some physiological. Some of these sections con- 

 tain plants of the most heterogeneous character ; one, 

 for instance, designated Bacciferae, includes Dicotyledons 

 like Solanum, Sambucus, and Cyclamen, and also Mono- 



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