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Sostems of Qlassifiration. 
HO it was that first invented a system of classification of 
plants is uncertain: Since the days when Solomon, king of 
Israel, “spake of trees from the Cedar tree that is in 
Lebanon even unto the Hyssop that springeth out of the 
., wall;” or those of Zoroaster, who is said to have taught 
that the primeval creative power called forth from the blood 
of the sacred bull 120,000 forms of plants; or earlier 
still, if the reader wishes, since the time when primitive 
man began first to observe and wonder at his surroundings, 
until the present hour, the glory of the vegetable creation 
has necessarily excited his admiration. The Chaldean 
shepherds, who are credited with the discovery of astron- 
omy, through their undisturbed contemplation of the 
“flowers of heaven,” could not have been entirely unmind- 
N ful of the “stars of earth, the beautiful flowers.” 
Theophrastus (B. c. 374-286), a Greck philosopher and pupil of Aristotle, wrote a 
“ History of Plants,” and a work “On the Causes of Plants,” which evince not a little 
knowledge of the organs and physiology thereof. Pliny the Elder (a. p. 23-49), in his 
great compilation, the “ Thirty-seven Books of Histories of Nature,” gives many curious 
bits of information in reference to about one thousand plants. Dioscorides, who flourished 
about one hundred years later, described five hundred plants; and his work is remarkable 
as being the source of much of the terminology still used in our books on floriculture. 
Scientific botany, however, owes its rise to the revival of letters in the sixteenth 
century. Otto Brunfels (1464-1534) is considered the first among the moderns to attempt 
a classification of plants. Andrea Cesalpino (1519-1603), Italian physician and botanist, 
was perhaps the first to establish a natural system of classification. Robert Morison 
(1620-83), a Scottish physician and botanist, separated plants into woody and herbaceous, 
and divided them into eighteen classes. John Ray (1628-14705), English botanist, sepa- 
rated flowering from flowerless plants, and subdivided the former into monocotyledonous 
and dicotyledonous plants. A. Q. Rivinus (1652-1723), a Saxon anatomist and botanist, 
published, in 1690, a system based on the differences of the corolla. J. P. de Tournefort 
(1656-1708), French botanist, described about eight thousand species in twenty-two classes, 
the classification being based mainly on the differences in the corolla. 
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