Text-fig. 63. “Carui” [Ortus Sanitatis, Mainz, 1491].
I. Leafless plants [Cryptogams in part].
II. Leafy plants [Phanerogams and certain Cryptogams].
1. Corticate plants [Monocotyledons].
2. Tunicate plants [Dicotyledons].
(a) Herbaceous.
(b) Woody.
The word tunicate in the above table is used for the plants which Albertus describes as growing “ex ligneis tunicis.” It seems clear from this expression that he realised that there was an anatomical distinction between Dicotyledons and Monocotyledons.
Considering how much Albertus had achieved, it is somewhat curious that Cesalpino, who represented Aristotelian botany in the sixteenth, as Albertus did in the thirteenth century, should have produced so inadequate a system as his own contribution to the subject. We owe to him one marked advance, the recognition, namely, of the importance of the seed. On the whole, however, his classification savours too much of having been thought out in the study, and it suffers by comparison with other systems of about the same period, such as those of de l’Obel and Bauhin, which were arrived at rather by instinct, acting upon observation, than by a definite and self-conscious intellectual effort.
Cesalpino makes his main distinction, on the old Aristotelian plan, between Trees and Shrubs on the one hand, and Undershrubs and Herbs on the other. He divides the first of these groups into two, and the second into thirteen classes, depending chiefly on seed and fruit characters. Very few of these classes really represent natural groups, and the chief of all distinctions among Flowering Plants, that between Dicotyledons and Monocotyledons, which was foreshadowed by Albertus, is almost lost to sight.
When we turn from the botanical philosophers to the herbalists proper, we find an altogether different state of affairs. The Aristotelian botanists were conscious, from the beginning, of the philosophic necessity for some form of classification. The medical botanists, on the other hand, were only interested in plants as individuals, and were driven to classify them merely because some sort of arrangement was necessary for convenience in dealing with a large number of kinds. The first Materia Medica, that of Dioscorides, shows some attempt at order, but the arrangement is seldom at all natural. Occasionally the author groups together plants which are nearly related, as when he treats of a number of Labiates, or of Umbellifers successively—but this is rare.
