The youngest branch of Botany is Ecology or the study of vegetation in relation to habitat—particularly soil in its widest sense. This department deals with the recognition and distribution of the different types of plant community in relation to topography and the factors—chemical, physical and biologic—which determine this distribution. Ecology has the great merit of taking its followers into the field, where they are confronted with a wide range of problems not hitherto regarded as strictly within the province of the botanist. At the same time it exacts the most critical acquaintance with the minutiae of the taxonomist, so that a new sphere of usefulness is opened to the systematist. Ecology should have a great part to play in helping to break down the frontiers which have too long tended to separate Botany from the other sciences, and the maintenance of which is not in the true interests of the subject.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Darwin and Modern Science.
[ROBERT MORISON AND JOHN RAY]
1620-1683 1627-1705
By SYDNEY HOWARD VINES
Early systems of classification—Theophrastus—the Herbalists—Cesalpino's De Plantis—Caspar Bauhin's Pinax Theatri Botanici—Morison—narrative—Botany at Oxford—the garden established—Jacob Bobart the elder—Morison's Historia Plantarum—completion by the younger Bobart—personal characteristics—Morison's works—the Praeludia—the Hallucinationes—the Dialogus—principles of method in his Plantarum Umbelliferarum Distributio Nova—posthumous publication of System—indebtedness to Cesalpino—Linnaeus' estimate of Morison—Ray—narrative—first attempt at a System—quarrel with Morison—the Methodus Nova—Dicotyledones and Monocotyledones—Linnaeus' criticisms—later Systems—the French school—Morison and Ray compared.
The literature of Botany can be traced back to a quite respectable antiquity, to the period of Aristotle (b.c. 384-322) who seems to have been the first to write of plants from the truly botanical point of view. Unfortunately, his special treatise on plants—θεωρία περὶ φυτῶν—is lost; and although there are many botanical passages scattered throughout his other writings (which have been collected by Wimmer, Phytologiae Aristotelicae Fragmenta, 1836), yet none of them gives any indication of what his ideas of classification may have been. An echo of them is perhaps to be found in the works of his favourite pupil, Theophrastus Eresius (b.c. 371-286), who among all his fellows was the most successful in pursuing the botanical studies that they had begun under the guidance of the master. Theophrastus left behind him two important, though incomplete, treatises on plants, the oldest that have survived: the more familiar Latin titles of which are De Historia Plantarum and De Causis Plantarum. The latter is essentially physiological, touching upon agriculture to a certain extent: the former is mainly morphological, structural, descriptive, and it is here that the first attempt at a classification of plants is to be found. In writing the Historia, Theophrastus was endeavouring, as a Greek philosopher rather than as a botanist, to "give account of" plants; and in order to do so he found it necessary to arrange them in some kind of order. Seizing upon obvious external features, he distinguished (Lib. i. cap. 5) and defined Tree, Shrub, Undershrub and Herb, giving examples; adding, however, that the definitions are to be accepted and understood as typical and general, "for some may seem perhaps to deviate" from them. Simple as was this mode of arrangement, Theophrastus further simplified it in the course of his work, by treating trees and shrubs as one group, and undershrubs and herbs as the other.