ECOLOGICAL WORK IN BOTANY. 
65 
them in nature. The figures and descriptions were meant to 
depict plants as they really were; not embellished with fabulous 
tales drawn from the imagination. Many of the former descrip¬ 
tions of common plants had been entirely borrowed from the 
ancient writers and supplemented with superstitious beliefs. 
In contrast to the preceding centuries, the peculiar merit of 
each new publication was held to depend, not on what the writer 
had borrowed from his predecessors, but on what he had added 
from his own observation. Hence every one was anxious to in¬ 
troduce into his work as many new or unnoticed plants as pos¬ 
sible. The most remarkable thing to us in these descriptions is 
the striking neglect of flower and fruit. They attempt to depict 
the form of the plant in words! Special attention was given to 
the shape of the leaves, the style of the branching, the character 
of the roots and the size and color of the flowers. 
The first men who might be called ecologists were students of 
plant distribution and, incidentally, of adaptation to the climatic 
and edaphic conditions of different lands. Later when plants had 
been named and an attempt at classification been made, students 
became interested in the life-history of the plant and its phys¬ 
iological response to the factors operating upon it. 
These preliminary remarks will serve to introduce us to the 
work of Andrea Cesalpino, an Italian who was professor at Pisa 
and later physician to Pope Clement VIII. He died in 1603. If 
the value of the work of the contemporary German botanists lay 
in the accumulation of descriptions of plants, the importance of 
Cesalpino’s De Plantis Libri XVI. lies in the discussion of the 
general thory of the subject. He gives in thirty pages a full and 
connected exposition of the whole of theoretical botany, which, 
though based on broad and general views, is at the same time 
rich in ideas expressed in a very concise form. He first seems 
to have understood the importance of the organs of fructification 
for classification. He attempts in his blind and often mistaken 
way, to express some sort of natural relationship between plants, 
and in so doing laid the foundations upon which Linnaeus built 
later. 
Linnaeus adopted all that the systematists of the seventeenth 
