* 166 THE AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 
to knowledge, but equally as great is the accomplishment of 
such labor, which simply emphasizes the aim of making 
knowledge accessible to others, to lay-men; to pave the way 
for the young student, the beginning botanist, calls for exact 
truthful knowledge acquired by a study of the living plants, 
and literary research. 
Some four hundred years ago botany was taught by means 
of illustrating and describing the plants. Classification was 
not attempted beyond “herbs, shrubs and trees,” and some- 
times the plants were enumerated simply alphabetically. But 
“the illustrations, wood-cuts, were remarkably true; they were 
drawn by artists from nature, and skilled botanists may 
readily recognize the species, which they represent. For in- 
stance, the wood-cuts in Fuchs’ Historia stirpium 1542 give 
a very characteristic figure of the respective plant; see for 
instance the drawings of Paris, Ranunculus Colchicum 
Fragaria, Orchis, Listera, Botrychium, Scolopendrium and 
numerous others. At that time the diagnoses were but im- 
perfect, the illustrations were the principal means of recog- 
nizing the plant. It became the merit of an Italian, Luca 
Ghini, to make the first herbarium, and his pupils, Aldrovandi 
and Caesalpino followed his example. In other words botany 
of the sixteenth century was taught through illustrations, 
herbarium-specimens and diagnoses. Two hundred years 
afterwards, Linné wrote his Philosophia Botanica (1751), in 
which he introduced the botanical terminology; the construc- 
tion of the diagnoses thus became facilitated, or let us say sim- 
plified. He went still further, for he elaborated also an ar- 
tificial system, by which the student might readily determine 
the genera. We all know, however, that Linné did believe 
in the possibility of establishing a natural system, and he 
actually proposed 67 groups or orders; these he enumerated 
in Philosophia Botanica “Methodi naturalis fragmenta 
studiose inquirenda sunt. Plantae omnes utrinque affinitatem 
monstrant, uti Territorium in Mappa geographica.” ; 
The first attempt to describe the natural families we owe 
to Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, the author of Genera  plan- 
tarum secundum ordines naturales disposita (Paris 1789) ; 
since then several other natural systems have been proposed, 
notably by Endlicher, Brongniart, Lindley, De Candolle, and 
Engler and Prantl. 
