6o SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



timable service ; though masters of the science in the seventeenth, 

 eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries of our era would not have 

 styled him Father of Botany. 



In our Study of this maker of the first Landmark in the History 

 of Botany the main object must be that of discovering in what 

 ways, under what limitations, and yet how well, he accomplished 

 the placing of knowledge of plant life and form upon the list of 

 the sciences. 



Method. That a treatise be recognizable as scientific it must be 

 methodical. It is even a necessary characteristic of it. There 

 must be a principle, or a set of principles according to which the 

 facts or propositions find an orderly arrangement. This does 

 not, however, imply that the method or system be of some par- 

 ticular kind, as, for example, that in botany one should be required 

 to arrange the matter of one's treatise according to what are con- 

 ceived to be the natural affinities between plant and plant. 

 The author who writes botany from the industrial point of 

 view, if he so elect, may discuss his plants in the order of their 

 relationship in families, genera, and species; or, ignoring taxonomy 

 of that sort, he may arrange them according to the nature of their 

 serviceability in household economy and what are called the 

 useful arts; may discuss in successive chapters food plants, drug 

 plants, textile plants, vegetable dye-stuffs; trees, as supplying 

 timber, fuel, oils, gums, sugars, resins, nuts, etc. That botanical 

 matter so arranged may be scientific can not successfully be 

 controverted. 



Theophrastus of Eresus might have adopted such a method as 

 this last. He was abundantly capable of discussing the plant world 

 from the economic and utilitarian standpoint; indeed, had he so 

 arranged the substance of his work he would but have been following 

 established precedent. Every treatise on plants which was extant 

 in his day was of the nature of agricultural, horticultural, or medical 

 botany. There was not yet any other method of arrangement for 

 botanical writing but the economical. Furthermore, his own 

 chapters everywhere abound in references to the qualities of plants, 

 and their uses in the economy of human life ; though such references 

 are commonly supplementary to the statement of other and differ- 

 ent considerations. The very title of his work, History of Plants 



— in more idiomatic English, The Story of the Plants seems to 



look toward an investigation of this realm of nature for its own 

 sake, the vegetable kingdom thought of philosophically rather than 

 industrially. No work was yet in existence, unless one by Aris- 



