200 A HISTORY OF GARDENING IN ENGLAND 
In 1669 he was appointed Professor of Botany at Oxford, with 
the degree of Doctor of Physic, and there he lectured and 
laboured at his Historia Plantarum Oxoniensis until his death, 
caused by an accident, in 1683. The systems evolved by these 
two men differed from those of all preceding botanists, inas¬ 
much as they were the first to classify plants according to some 
real likeness in the fruit or flower, and not merely from 
similarity of habit or place of growth. Morison divided her¬ 
baceous plants into fifteen classes ; Ray into twenty-five, and 
trees and shrubs into eight. These systems, which paved the 
way, so to speak, for Jussieu, Robert Brown, and others, came 
at a time when they were most needed. From East and West, 
from the Old World and from the New, plants were pouring in 
yearly in increasing numbers ; and the necessity of arranging 
these newly-acquired treasures was the foremost task of 
botanists. 
