HISTORY OF CLASSIFICATION 
5 
ancients. Any shrub having a dark green narrow pointed leaf, thick and 
leathery, was referred by the Greeks to the genus Daphne of the Greeks, 
that is Laurus or Laurel, and included such plants as true Laurel, as 
Oleander, as Butcher’s Broom—all belonging to widely different natural 
families, but all called Laurel because of their shiny entire leaves, just 
as so-called to this day by illiterates, a few gardeners and some vain 
intellectuals. Many of the genera of the herbalists were, to be sure, 
natural, many more were not, because they were constantly misled by 
analogies, a source of error persisting to the present day. 
The first botanist to minimize mere external appearance, and so make 
a step in the right direction, was Caesalpino of Florence who was thus 
far ahead of his time. He distributed' all known plants into fifteen 
classes, the distinguishing marks being based on the fruit. This was the 
earliest methodical arrangement of plants but was extremely faulty, 
because based on a single organ. 
We now come to the Seventeenth Century. Of all botanists up to this 
period, John Ray, the Englishman, was the most enlightened and did 
most to advance the science of botany. In his system, which is the fore¬ 
runner of the natural system, he separates flowering plants from flower¬ 
less plants and divides flowering plants into Monocotlyedons and Dico¬ 
tyledons, though strangely enough, subordinating these to the old division 
into herbs and woody plants. r His orders show a keen appreciation of 
natural affinities amongst plants. 
Tournefort, the French botanist, flourished in this century, and is 
often spoken of as the founder of genera. His system which rested chiefly 
on the form of the corollas, was displaced in the next century, the Eigh¬ 
teenth, by that of Linnaeus which was founded on characters derived 
from the stamens and pistils, and especially the number of these organs, 
and is commonly called the sexual system. It furnished an extraordinarily 
facile and usable means of arranging plants, and together with the binary 
principle of nomenclature laid down by its author, gave a tremendous 
popular impulse to the study of botany. It was, however, a purely 
artificial arrangement, since plants of one family may vary greatly in 
stamen number and pistil number. The result was that closely allied 
plants were often separated in different classes and unrelated plants were 
brought together in one class. In so far as his classes are natural they 
are so because the number and position of the stamens have nothing to 
do with the sexual function, but they do by position and number indicate 
affinity. Linnaeus himself recognized that his system was a temporary 
expedient and declared the object of botanical science to be the discovery 
of a natural system. The most lasting contribution of the great Swedish 
botanist was the binomial method of naming plants, the binomial consist¬ 
ing of two parts, the genus name, as Brassica (Mustard), and the species 
name, nigra, black, Brassica nigra, the binomial thus not only affording 
a name for a plant but also indicating its relationship. Linnaeus was a 
very remarkable botanist and yet the gaps in his knowledge interest us 
exceedingly. He did not observe and did not even reason that figs had 
flowers and put them into his class Cryptogamia or flowerless plants. 
A new era in botanical science dawned with the publication in 1789 of 
