June 30, 1 910 



RECENT LITERATURE 

 Landmarks OF BOTANICAL HISTORY: A Study oi Certain 

 Epochs in the Development of the Science of Botany. 

 Part 1. _i> r i () r to 1562 A. I). By Edward Lee Greene. 



Washington. Published by the Smithsonian Institution. 



1909. 



Dr. Greene does not undertake, in the present treatise, a 

 formal history of botany. Rather he desires to give an account 

 of certain early botanists who, as is suggested by the felicitous 

 title of his work, loom up like headlands, as one navigates the 

 misty seas of prelinnean science. And for such a voyage there 

 could be desired no better pilot. His predilection for the early 

 botanists is well known. To do justice to them he has hereto- 

 fore adopted the unconventional expedient of supplanting famil- 

 iar generic names bv their long disused ones. In the present 

 work he honors them in a better way, by recounting their labors 

 in laying the foundations of botanical science. 



In a preliminary chapter he considers the character of the 

 science, distinguishing between the philosophic side, which is 

 concerned with the nature and relationships of plants, and its 

 utilitarian aspect, which regards their uses. It was from this 

 side that it was approached by its early cultivators. The author 

 urges that long, before the first bo >k on plants was written, there 

 existed a crude recognition of the interrelationship of plants, a 

 designation of their superficial parts, and a vernacular nomen- 

 clature. 



It is not within the period here embraced that botanists 

 ceased to be primarily herbalists and ruralists. Plants, therefor, 

 were grouped on resemblances of root, stem and leaf. In time 

 some weight was given to fruit character, and toward the end of 

 the period under consideration the importance of the flower came 

 to be dimly perceived. Rut it was not until the day of Cesal- 

 pino that there came the appeal to anthology and carpology as 

 the authentic bases of taxonomy. 



Organographv was thus the foundation of botany, rudely 

 laid in a past beyond the possibility of measuring. "It did not 



