Nos. 620-621] JOAN BAFT I ST A POET A 



4.V.) 



minor groups, characterized by the structure of fruit and 

 seed, are not natural, except the sixth, which comprises 

 the Umbelliferae, the tenth, Boraginese and Labiatae, and 

 the fifteenth, plants destitute of flowers and fruits, ferns, 

 mosses, and fungi. 



Naturally the tendency to classify governed botanical 

 research during as early a period as the sixteenth cen- 

 tury, and the various systems proposed were all purely 

 artificial. Not until the year 1703 were the Phanero- 

 gams distinguished as mono- and dicotyledonous by Ray. 

 We remember that so late as the middle of the eighteenth 

 century Linne established his artificial system, based 

 upon the floral structure, and at about the same time 

 Antoine Laurent de Jussieu undertook the task to de- 

 scribe the families. In other words, Bauhin wrote the 

 diagnoses of the species, Tournefort (about 1700) char- 

 acterized the genera, Linne arranged the genera in 

 groups, which he named only, and finally Jussieu estab- 

 lished a natural system with family-diagnoses. But re- 

 turning to the sixteenth century, the actual knowledge 

 of the plants was embodied in systems, and beyond the 

 mere classification no attempts were made to consider 

 the plants from a biological viewpoint, as members of a 

 living world adapted to environments of highly different 

 nature as to climate and soil, at least not in accordance 

 with the history of botany. The treatment of this par- 

 ticular phase of plant life was reserved to the very close 

 of the nineteenth century, when Warming 2 introduced a 

 supposed new branch of botanical science, dealing with 

 plant societies, now universally recognized as plant ecol- 

 ogy. The appearance of this work has brought about a 

 fuller valuation of the factors that govern plant life, a 

 purely biologic consideration of the plants on morpho- 

 logical and physiological grounds. However, twenty 

 years of experience has taught us that this branch of 

 botanical science lacks organization and is yet rather to 

 be compared with a speculation having run far in ad- 

 vance of facts. Nevertheless the supposed new doctrine 



