Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 65.djvu/71

Rh my Mother Nature, by whose advice, together with the help of Dr. Diligence, I at last obtained my desire, and being warned by Mr. Honesty, a stranger in our days, to publish it to the World, I have done it." Culpeper seems to have been absolutely saturated with his astrological notions; he tells us that 'seed sowed at the wane of the Moon, grows either not at all, or to no purpose'!

Returning to the earliest herbals, we find that the idea of natural relationship between plants, or even of the necessity of any sort of classification, is scarcely existent. The anonymous Herbal of 1525, and the 'Grete Herball' are both arranged alphabetically. But the 'Grete Herball' contains the germ of a classification of the fungi—a classification of the most charming simplicity! "Fungi ben mussherons. There be two maners of them, one maner is deadly and sleeth them that eateth of them, and be called todestoles, and the other dooth not." Exactly fifty years after the publication of the 'Grete Herball,' Lobel's 'Herbal' appeared, and from it we gather that during this half century the idea of natural affinity had been in a sort of dim instinctive fashion getting hold of men's minds. He describes in succession rushes, grasses, bulbous plants, orchidaceous plants, crucifers, composite plants, etc. The arrangements adopted by Dodoens and later by Gerarde are similar to that of Lobel, but slightly more natural. Parkinson in 1640 gives a more elaborate classification, and though it seems very primitive when judged by the standard of the present day, especially as regards the stress laid on the 'virtues' of the plants, yet it shows that great progress had been made since the publication of the earliest herbals. He divides all plants into seventeen classes, some of which are quite satisfactory, while others, such as No. 14, which includes 'Marsh, Water and Sea Plants, and Mosses and Mushrooms,' are a trifle too comprehensive! There is something charmingly naive about the titles of his fifteenth and seventeenth classes. These are 'The Unordered Tribe' and 'Strange and Outlandish Plants.'

Early in the next century Linnæus was born. A vast mass of information had been accumulating for two hundred years, and it needed a luminous intellect like his to reduce it to order. As the fruit of his labor we have his marvelous 'System,' in which he followed a much earlier writer, the Italian botanist, Cesalpinus, in attributing the chief importance to the organs of fructification. The day of the herbal proper may be said to have closed with Linnæus and thenceforward botany proceeded on more strictly scientific lines. The subject sprang into fashion in his time in the most astonishing way, probably owing to the easy method which his 'System' offered of tracking down and identifying plants—from the chosen pursuit of a few enthusiasts it became the heritage of the many—it was dubbed the 'loveliest of the sciences,' and 'recommended especially to ladies, as a harmless pastime, not overtaxing to the mind.'