LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 239 



characteristic. There was now common in Germany one bread- 

 stuff plant which the ancients had not known, namely, buckwheat. 

 Tragus describes and figures it among the proper cereals, but 

 with the remark that it differs from all the rest of them in that it ; 

 comes up from the seed with a pair of leaves instead of with one 

 alone, in this respect more like a turnip or cabbage.' And although ' 

 he was a student of wild plants rather than of cultivated, there are 

 many instances of his concluding a description with the statement 

 that the seedlings of such a plant come up with two leaves. Now and 

 then he mentions the outline of such seed leaves in some particular 

 plant as contrasted with those of some other; showing that he not 

 only observed but compared them in different plants. But this 

 does not seem to have had any purpose beyond that of gratifying 

 his own curiosity and stimulating the like in his readers. There is 

 no indication of his having apprehended the taxonomic significance 

 of these distinctions between monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous 

 seeds. The time for the birth of this great thought lay distant 

 from Tragus a hundred years and more. 



Taxonomy. In his Preface Tragus abjures the alphabetic 

 arrangement of genera as unscientific, bringing in confusion where 

 natural order ought to be. He is clear in expressing the determina- 

 tion to adopt a natural sequence. " In describing things, I come 

 as nearly as I can to keeping by themselves such plants as nature 

 seems to have linked together by similarity of form."^ This was 

 no new proposition. Ever since plants had first been observed 

 philosophically, and written about, various groups, varying sever- 

 ally as to their extent and inclusiveness, had gained recognition as 

 natural groups through resemblances in morphology. Tragus 

 knew this well, and was only indicating his choice of natural method, 

 in preference to the purely artificial alphabetic arrangement of 

 genera, such as Fuchs and Gesner saved themselves labor by ad- 

 hering to. Neither does he contemplate considerable innovations 

 upon the long established method of grouping and arranging 

 things. By his own frequent peerings into the curiosities of floral 

 structures and recording what he saw, he has vividly suggested a 

 new anthology. He has even begun it; and in the course of its 

 future development it is going to revolutionize taxonomy completely 

 and that twice over; yet nothing of this is even dreamed of by 

 Tragus ; and his superior knowledge of floral morphology has little 

 real and almost no appreciable effect upon his own classifyings. 



' Stirp. Comm., p. 648. 



2 Ibid., Praefatio, ch. xiv. , 



