THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 43 



T583, proposed to form species into classes, and thus originated 

 systematic botany. The characters which he employed f©r this 

 purpose were the duration and size of plants, the presence of 

 absence of flowers, the number of cotyledons, the situation of the 

 seed, the adherence of the pericarp to the seed, the number of cells 

 in the paricarp with the number of seeds in each of these cells, the 

 adherence of the calyx to the germ, and the nature of the root, 

 whether bulbous or filrous. This method was too imperfect to 

 be adopted, however, and for nearly a century no one appeared to 

 follow in the path which Caesalpinus had opened. During this 

 interval though, the science was gradually improved in its details, 

 Clusius teaching botanists to describe accurately by discarding 

 superfluous terms without the omission of any important character- 

 istic, and the brothers, John and Caspar, Bauhin adding to their re- 

 spective works a synonymy, or exact hst of the different names which 

 all previous writers had applied to the same plant. In the same 

 period, too, flourished a number of other and less illustrious authors, 

 some of them chiefly notable for the useless or laughable systems 

 they proposed, to wit. : Du Pas, a Frenchman, suggested an 

 arrangement of plants by their time of flowering, and Porta, an 

 Itahan, one from their relation to the stars, to men, and to other 

 animals. 



In 1680, Robert Morison, a native of Aberdeen, Scotland, and 

 Superintendent of the Botanic Gardens at Oxford, revived and 

 carried into practice the principle Of C^esalpinus, in his great 

 systematic work, " The Universal History of Plants." Morison sets 

 out with the division of plants, from their consistence, into ligneous 

 and herbaceous, and founds his system on their fruit, blossoms, and 

 habits. Two years later, John Ray, of Trinity College, Cambridge, 

 proposed another system of classification in his " Methodus Planta- 

 rum Nova," a work amended and completed in 1703. He divided 

 plants into thirty-five classes, formed on their habits and external 

 appearances, their greater, or less degrees of perfection, their place of 

 growth, the number of seeds, petals or sepals to the flower, and the 

 kind of fruit or infloresence. The great merit of Ray's system was 

 his division of herbs into flowerless and flowering, and the latter into 

 dicotyledenous and monocotyledonous ; its great fault the primary 

 division of plants into trees and herbs. This division of plants into 

 trees and herbs, referring the larger shrubs to the former the under- 



