In the history of botanical classification, the first advance from the purely utilitarian standpoint was marked by the recognition of the fact that the structure and mode of life of the plants themselves are of importance. In the work of writers such as Dodoens and d’Aléchamps, to take two typical examples, we find the issues curiously confused by the working of three different principles side by side; that is to say, by the simultaneous insistence (i) on the habitat, (ii) on the “virtues,” and (iii) on the structure, as affording clues to the systematic position of the plant in question. The herbalist thus erects his scheme on a basis consisting of a confused medley of ecological, medical, and morphological principles. An enumeration of the eighteen headings, under which d’Aléchamps, in 1586, described the vegetable kingdom, so far as it was then known, will show the perplexities which surrounded the first gropings after a natural system. His headings may be translated as follows:—

I.Of trees which grow wild in woods.
II.Of fruits growing wild in thickets and shrubberies.
III.Of trees which are cultivated in pleasure gardens and orchards.
IV.Of cereals and pulse, and the plants which grow in the field with them.
V.Of garden herbs and pot herbs.
VI.Of umbelliferous plants.
VII.Of plants with beautiful flowers.
VIII.Of fragrant plants.
IX.Of plants growing in marshes.
X.Of plants growing in rough, rocky, sandy and sunny places.
XI.Of plants growing in shady, wet, marshy and fertile places.
XII.Of plants growing by the sea, and in the sea itself.
XIII.Of climbing plants.
XIV.Of thistles and all spiny and prickly plants.
XV.Of plants with bulbs, and succulent and knotty roots.
XVI.Of cathartic plants.
XVII.Of poisonous plants.
XVIII.Of foreign plants.

Among these eighteen groups, the only ones which have any pretension to being natural are VI (Umbellifers) and XIV (Thistles), and these merely approximate roughly to related groups of genera. Among the Umbellifers we meet with Achillea and other genera which do not really belong to the order, whilst, with the Thistles, there are grouped other spiny plants, such as Astragalus tragacantha, which, in a natural system, would occupy a place remote from the Composites.

Text-fig. 68. “Ninfea” = Waterlily [Durante, Herbario Nuovo, 1585].

In spite of the fact that improved systems of classification, to which we shall shortly refer, were put forward in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, we find that, as late as 1640, John Parkinson in his well known herbal, divided all the plants then known into seventeen classes or tribes—the sequence in which these classes were placed having, in most cases, no meaning at all. A few of his tribes are natural, but many are valueless as an expression of affinities. As an example we may mention his third class, “Venemous, Sleepy, and Hurtfull Plants, and their Counterpoysons,” and his seventeenth, “Strange and Outlandish Plants.” In Parkinson’s classification, we see Botany reverting once more to the position of a mere handmaid to Medicine.

In the first book of Dodoens’ ‘Pemptades’ (1583) the principles of botany are discussed. The old Aristotelian classification into Trees, Shrubs, Undershrubs and Herbs is accepted, but with some reservations. The author points out that an individual plant may, owing to cultivation, or from some other cause, pass from one class into another. He instances Ricinus, which is an herbaceous annual with us, but a tree in other countries[31].