Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/71

 the sterile plants are termed male, the fruitful female. Thus he distinguished the cases which we now call dioecious from the previously mentioned monoecious plants, among which he reckons the maize.

All this may serve to give the reader some idea, though a very incomplete one, of Cesalpino's theory; to do him justice, it would be necessary to give a full account of his very numerous, accurate, and often acute observations on the position of leaves, the formation of fruit, the distribution of seeds and their position in the fruit, of his comparative observations on the parts of the fruit in different plants, and above all of his very excellent description of plants with tendrils and climbing plants, of those that are armed with thorns and the like. Though there is naturally much that is erroneous and inexact in his accounts, yet we have before us in the chapters on these subjects the first beginning of a comparative morphology, which quite casts into the shade all that Aristotle and Theophrastus have said on the subject. But the most brilliant portions of his general botany are contained in the 12th, 13th, and 14th chapters, in which he gives the outlines of his views on the systematic arrangement of plants; to prepare the way for what is to follow, he shows first that it is better to give up the four old divisions of the vegetable kingdom, and to unite the shrubs with the trees and the undershrubs with the herbs. But how these genera are to be distinguished into species is, he says, hard to conceive, for the multitude of plants is almost innumerable; there must be many intermediate genera containing the 'ultimae species,' but few are as yet known. He then turns to the divisions founded on the relations of plants to men. Such groups, he says, as vegetables and kinds of grain, which are put together under the name of 'fruges' and kitchen-herbs ('olera'), are formed more from the use made of them than from the resemblance of form, which we require; and he shows this by good examples. The discerning of plants, he continues, is very difficult, for so long as the genera (larger groups) are undetermined, the species must