43 



In the sixteenth century in northern Europe, particularly 

 Germany, there was a movement towards the real study of plants 

 from the plants themselves as evidenced by the works of the 

 herbalists, but no attempt at classification was made. Here 

 there was an attempt at the enumeration and illustration of plants 

 from living specimens, and confused and empirical as this work 

 was, it was actuated by an honest endeavor to record, as accu- 

 rately as possible, actual forms, and not fanciful abstractions 

 which never did and never could have existed. All the descrip- 

 tions were detached from one another and little or no attempt 

 was made at classification, though by the repeated study of 

 many similar forms the idea of natural relationship began to 

 dawn in a vague way. The actual purpose of all this plant study 

 was the recording of the officinal plants, for special knowledge 

 of plants was still confined to their uses in medicine. 



While this movement was advancing in northern Europe, a 

 mainly artificial system of classification was developing in Italy 

 and found its culmination in the work of Caesalpino, who 

 strongly influenced the progress of botany, even after his own 

 time and into the middle of the eighteenth century. Great as 

 was the advance he made, it would have been far greater had it 

 been given him to break away from the scholastic philosophy 

 which hampered him. We find a curious mixture of a modern 

 spirit of inductive natural science and Aristotelian methods of 

 thought. The latter triumphed in the main, and the result was 

 a formal classification built on idealistic abstractions that is wholly 

 fallacious from our standpoint of to-day. 



Emerging from such conditions we find Linnaeus — the bi- 

 centenary of whose birth was celebrated last year — and though 

 he too was much influenced by the earlier writers, to him belongs 

 the credit of the emphasis on the fact that some natural system 

 of the classification of plants must exist even though he could 

 not determine it. Linnaeus is popularly termed the father of 

 botany and of zoology as well, and in many senses there is reason 

 for it. He was a born classifier and brought considerable order 

 out of immense chaos, but still his classification was artificial, and 

 only to a very limited degree recognized the natural relationships 



