however, really essential. In the preface to the ‘Phytopinax’ (1596) Bauhin states that, for the sake of clearness, he has applied one name to each plant and added also some easily recognisable character[30].
The binomial method was foreshadowed at a very early date, for in a fifteenth-century manuscript of the old herbal ‘Circa instans,’ to which we have referred on p. [24], this system prevails to a remarkable extent.
When we turn to those general schemes of classification which were evolved by the herbalists of the sixteenth century, we are at once struck by the great difference existing between the principles on which these schemes are based, and those at which we have arrived at the present day. To classify plants according to their uses and medicinal properties is obviously the first suggestion that arises, when the universe is regarded from a simple, anthropocentric standpoint. In the Grete Herball of 1526 we get a ludicrously clear example of this method, applied to the special case of the Fungi. “Fungi ben mussherons.... There be two maners of them, one maner is deedly and sleeth [slayeth] them that eateth of them and be called tode stoles, and the other dooth not.” This account of the Fungi occurs also in the earlier manuscript herbal, ‘Circa instans,’ mentioned in the last paragraph.
This theory of classification has been shown in more recent times to contain the germ of something more nearly approaching a natural system than one would imagine at first sight. Both Linnæus and de Jussieu have pointed out that related plants have similar properties, and, in 1804, A. P. de Candolle, in his ‘Essai sur les propriétés médicales des Plantes, comparées avec leurs formes extérieures et leur classification naturelle,’ carried the argument much further. He showed that in no less than twenty-one families of flowering plants, the same medicinal properties were found throughout all the members of the order. This is very remarkable, when we remember that the state of knowledge at that time was such that de Candolle was obliged to dismiss a large number of orders with the words “properties unknown.” Quite recently the subject of the differentiation of groups of plants according to their chemistry has again come to the fore, and, in the future, chemical characters will probably be numbered among the recognised criteria for use in elaborating schemes of classification.
Text-fig. 66. “Nenuphar” = Nymphæa alba L., White Waterlily [Brunfels, Herbarum vivæ eicones, Vol. I. 1530]. Reduced.
Text-fig. 67. “Gele Plompen” = Nuphar luteum Sm., Yellow Waterlily [de l’Obel, Kruydtbœck, 1581].