4 
HISTORY OF CLASSIFICATION 
various plants but he had no conception of the real structure of the 
flower, nor, though he speaks of “male” and “female/’ did he appre¬ 
hend sexual significance in plants. That the flower necessarily goes be¬ 
fore the seed, he did not understand, for he says of the female date palm 
that it exhibits its fruit without any antecedent flower, though he sees 
that the male tree has a flower. In other cases as in that of the fig he 
reasons that since the tree has fruit and seed, it must have flowers, albeit 
he admits never having seen them. He indicated clearly the difference 
between the germination of the seed of barley or w r heat and of beans and 
other leguminous plants, but he did not comprehend the extended clas- 
sificatory significance of this observation which foreshadows the division 
of monocotyledons and dicotyledons. While in few cases did Theophras¬ 
tus see the full significance of his determined facts, nevertheless for his 
day he made many profound observations: he named various gross 
organs; he distinguished between permanent and transient organs, be¬ 
tween centripetal and centrifugal inflorescences; he recognized aerial 
roots as roots and set them off from tendrils and pointed out that all 
underground so-called roots are not roots—a germ of the science of 
morphology which was to lead after two thousand years to great con¬ 
sequences. 
Theophrastus is often spoken of by the predatory intellectual with 
some emphasis as a philosopher rather than as a botanist, as if the terms 
were mutually exclusive, but I may be pardoned for pointing out that 
when a philosopher in this day wishes to know whether figs have flowers, 
he does not depend upon philosophic reasoning but sends a wire to me 
by Western Union Telegraph, collect. It is most interesting nevertheless 
to see that Theophrastus, two thousand years ago, knew so much that 
we know. 
In 77 to 78 A. D., Dioscorides wrote his Materia Medica, in which he 
described 400 medicinal plants. He is the most popular botanical author 
that ever lived, since no other botanical book ever had such a run: it 
passed through numberless editions and continued to be the most valu¬ 
able and most used guide to medicinal plants until the Seventeenth Cen¬ 
tury. 
The Sixteenth Century was the age of the herbalists, Brunfels, Fuchs, 
Bach, Turner and many others. These men went direct to the fields and 
woods to study plants and developed to a high degree, especially in Brun¬ 
fels’ Herbarium, the art of plant illustration. While in most cases the 
illustrations were made from studies of living plants, they stand along¬ 
side descriptions copied from the ancients because it was not yet under¬ 
stood how great was the difference in genera and species between the 
plants of western and northern Europe and the plants of Greece. One 
of the herbalists in particular, Valericus Cordus, does wholly otherwise 
than to copy and shows genius, for (as Tournefort says) he was the first 
of all men to excel in plant description. Fuchs’ Historia Stirpium is im¬ 
portant in that he abandons the alphabetical arrangement which had held 
since the Greeks. These herbalists had, however, little success at clas¬ 
sification, except to bring together certain plants of habital similarity. 
This practice of regarding the externals had also come down from the 
