Mar. 31, 1908. The Queensland Naturalist. 
11 
in 1736, in his *Fundamenta Botanica, that a botanist of a 
later age — S. H. Vines — has spoken of as being “ An un- 
rivalled descriptive apparatus that must always be regarded 
as one of his many great achievements,” and that con- 
stitutes LinnaBus— -to quote another, H. Fries — “the real 
lawgiver in the realm of descriptive botany.” 
Linn^its as a Propounder of Systems of 
Classificatioks . 
Linn ECUS, however, not only served as the father of 
scientific nomenclature of animals and plants ; and, as the 
champion and exemplar of accurate and concise scientific 
language in their description ; but also, as the elaborator 
of systems of arrangement for one and the other. 
First, to consider this aspect of his work from a botanical 
standpoint. Authors living prior to the age of Linnaeus 
(1707-1778) dealing with but a small number of kinds of 
I)lants, were content to arrange them in accordance with 
their general aspects — under the terms trees, shrubs, herbs,, 
etc. ; or, regarding them from the point of view of the 
physician, to group them with respect to their properties. 
Caesalpinus, however, writing towards the end of 
the 16th century, attempted an arrangement founded upon 
both fruit and seed. Tournfort. in 1694, propoun-ded a 
system based on characters afforded by the floral-envelope 
after first dividing herbs and trees (including 
shrubs). The English botanist, Ray, writing a hundred 
years later than Csesalx^inus (1668-1703) not only distin- 
guished in his classification between dicotyledons and 
monocotyledons, but also took cognizance of the characters 
of flowers regular and flowers irregular — marking a great 
advance. 
These successive efforts, aided materially by the 
numerous figures of plants issued by various writers on the 
subject, led, moreover, to certain well defined groups of 
plants being recognised, e.g., Giumacege, Umbeliiferse, 
Labiatsc, Leguminosse, and the bulbous kinds. 
A\l the systems for the arrangement of species, 
propounded from the time of Csesalpinus to that of himself, 
Linnaeus discussed in a work issued in 1738, named Classes 
Plantarum. 
In 1735 {Systema Naturae, Fob ed.) he further set forth 
a system of his own, in which he based the arrangement 
of plants, on characters presented by the essential floral 
organs (stamens and x^istil), the relation of the stamens 
with the latter, their occurence with the pistil within the 
same flower or otherwise ; their individual freedom or 
