1005. The first writers on botany, such as Theophrastus, &c., grouped their plants according to their habits and nature; placing together the water plants, parasites, forest trees, &c.; and our earliest English writers on plants, such as Gerard and Parkinson, adopted a similar method of arrangement. Fuchsius and some other writers, on the contrary, classed their plants from their use in medicine, placing those they called hot apart from those they called cold. The first of these methods, that of classing plants according to their habit of growth, had certainly many advantages in helping persons but little acquainted with horticulture to arrange their gardens; and the classing of plants according to their medicinal qualities must have been of great use at the time when plants were principally cultivated for their application in medicine. Our ancestors appear to have had very little idea of cultivating plants for the beauty of their flowers, and the first gardens that did not consist merely of culinary fruits and vegetables were simply, as, indeed, they were called, physic gardens, that is, gardens in which the plants used in medicine were collected, partly that they might be ready when wanted and partly that students studying medicine might see them, and become acquainted with their forms. The botanic garden at Chelsea was a garden of this kind, established by the Apothecaries' Company for the use of young men who intended to become apothecaries; and the botanic gardens at Oxford and Cambridge were for students in medicine at the Universities. When chemistry was comparatively little known, mineral remedies were looked upon with dread, while vegetable medicines were in constant use. It was natural, therefore, that the earlier botanists should class plants together by their medicinal qualities; but the modes of classification were so vague, from the great number of plants that possessed nearly the same quality, that the classification was of little use, unless it was accompanied by long verbal descriptions ; and it was partly the trouble occasioned by these long descriptions that mode the system of Linnï¾µus be so eagerly accepted by all scientific men. The great Swede swept away the whole of the verbiage which he found encumbering botany ; he invented specific names to express in one word what his predecessors had employed a sentence to explain; and he limited his Latin specific distinctions to twelve words.
