Makers of British botany
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 favorite 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 Planetarium 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 endeavoring, 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 under shrubs and herbs as the other.
There was but one author, during this period, who made any material contribution to the science of classification, and that was Joachim Jung of Hamburg (1587—1657). Jung is best known by his Isagoge Phytoscopica (1678, ed. Valet), the most philosophic and scientific treatise on plants that had appeared since the time of Aristotle, which is the foundation upon which the whole superstructure of plant-morphology and descriptive botany has since been erected. But it was in his De Plants Doxoscopiae Physicae Minores (1662, ed. Vogel) that he expressed his views on systematic Botany. He did not propound a system of his own, but he sought to arrive at the principles upon which a classification should be based, with the logical result that he rejected the time-honored Theophrastian division of plants into Trees and Herbs. Though Jung failed to produce any immediate impression upon the Botany of his time, he powerfully influenced the great developments which took place in the eighteenth century. It so happened that Ray, as he mentions in his Index Planetarium Agri Cantabrigiensis (1660), had obtained through Samuel Hartlib a MS. of the whole or part of Jung’s Isagoge, which seems to have impressed him so much that he included many of Jung’s morphological definitions in the glossary appended to the Index; and he subsequently embodied the Isagoge in the first volume of his Historia Plantarum (1686). It was from Ray’s Historia that Linnaeus learned the morphological principles and terminology of Jung which were the basis of his own work in descriptive Botany, and rendered possible the elaboration of his system of classification. But, in spite of Jung, the venerable division of plants into Trees and Herbs continued to hold its own for a time. As will be seen, it was still adhered to by Morison and by Ray, even after it had been shown to be quite untenable by Rivinus (Introductio Generalis in Rem Herbariam) in 1690, and did not finally disappear until the time of Linnaeus.
Morison’s chief occupation at Oxford was the preparation of his long promised magnum opus, the Historia Planetarium Universalis Oxoniensis. It was planned on a most extensive scale, and proved to be a laborious and costly undertaking. Morison impoverished himself in the preparation even of the one volume of it that appeared in his lifetime, though his many friends provided the cost of the 126 plates of figures with which it is illustrated, and the University advanced considerable sums of money. The work was to have been issued in three parts: the first part was to be devoted to Trees and Shrubs, and the other two parts to the Herbs. The volume published by Morison in 1680, and described as Pars Secunda, deals with only five out of the fifteen sections into which he classified herbaceous plants, although it extends to more than 600 folio pages. In the preface he gives as his reason for beginning with the Herbs rather than with the Trees and Shrubs, that he wished to accomplish first the most difficult part of his task lest, in the event of his death before the completion of the Historia, it should fall into the hands of incompetent persons. He did not live to finish his great undertaking. In November, 1683, he was in London on business connected with it: as he was crossing the Strand near Charing Cross, he was knocked down by a coach, and was so severely injured that he died on the following day. He was buried in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields.
The mention of a system of classification based on the form of the leaf evoked from Botanographus a pointed allusion to a book recently published by a Fellow of the Royal Society in which such a classification had been used, with the following severe comment: “Ego tantrum confused Chaos: illic, de plants legs, new quicquam didici, ut monstrabo tibi et lapses et confusion, alias.” The book so criticized was the encyclopedic work edited by Dr John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, and published by the Royal Society in 1668, entitled, “An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language” to which John Ray had contributed the botanical article ‘Tables of Plants.’ This criticism was the beginning of the unfriendly relations between Morison and Ray, of which some further account will be given subsequently.