42 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



In Other words, an artificial system arranges plants on a certain part, 

 or parts, of them, while a natural one takes all the parts into con- 

 sideration. 



The initial point of this epoch was the arising of greater 

 independence of thought concerning ancient writers. Men began to 

 say — we have been looking everywhere for the plants of Theo- 

 phrastus, Dioscorides, and Pliny, whereas they did not know a tithe 

 of those covering the earth. What foolishness to endeavor to apply 

 to the plants of one's own country, France, England, etc, as the 

 case might be, the names under which these men described those of 

 Greece and Asia, without knowing whether they are the same. We 

 must explore each country, and collect, examine and compare the 

 plants of the one with the other, for then only will we be in a 

 position to distinguish them. 



About 1536 the first botanical garden of modern times was 

 establish in Italy, on the banks of the river Po, by Brasavola, but to 

 the Germans belongs the honor of being the first. to publish books 

 founded mainly on actual observation — Otto Brunfels, of Mayence, 

 having issued such a work in 1530. It also contained the first cuts, 

 but, as Willdenow remarks : " The drawings are not very good, and 

 do not in the least correspond with his own descriptions." To Ger- 

 many is also due the credit, in the Herbal of Jerome Bock, published 

 1532, of producing the first botanist, who replaced the old alphebeti- 

 cal order, in which plants had always been hitherto described, with 

 an arrangement depending on their natural resemblances, that is 

 the likeness which may be observed by the most unscientific persons 

 in their general forms and characters. Crude as was his work it 

 introduced a new principle which had the greatest influence m 

 promoting the advancement of systematic botany. Up to this time 

 botanists had blindly followed the ancient writers in classifying 

 plants by their roots, herbage, time of flowering, place of growth- 

 medical or economic uses, and other arbitrary distinctions, and it was 

 not till about 1560 that Conrad Gesner, of Zurich, in his " Historia 

 Plantarum," first suggested the existence, in the vegetable kingdom, 

 of groups, or genera, each composed of many species united by 

 similar characters of the flower and fruit. Gesner did not, however, 

 establish any plan founded upon this principle, but, having formu- 

 lated the idea, left its first application to Dr. Andrew C^esalpinus, a 

 physician of Pisa, Italy, who, in a work published in Florence, in 



