1Messieurs,

2We saw that Conrad Gessner,1 the same Gessner who became so famous with his work in zoology and who is also one of those who helped expand scholarship in botany the most by establishing that it is in the flower, the fruit, and the seed —basically in the various parts involved in fructification— that we must look for the essential characteristics that enable the classification of plants. This concept, which was so accurate, was actually not generally accepted immediately after it was released. We will see several authors who continued to classify plants according to their use, their places of origin, the alphabetical order of their name, basically in ways that did not allow for easy identification, although identification is the purpose of any method.

3The first of these authors in chronological order is Mathias de Lobel,2 born in Lille in 1538. He studied in Montpellier with Rondelet3 and undertook many trips to the Pyreneans, Switzerland, and Germany. He then became physician to William I Prince of Orange4 and botanist to James I King of England.5 He died at Highgate near London in 1616. He published a book called Stirpium adversaria nova, etc. or New memoirs on plants.6 This book, which he dedicated to Queen Elizabeth,7 was printed in London in 1570 and was the object of several editions. It was printed again in Antwerp in 1576, with more details, under the title of Plantarum seu stirpium historia, etc.8 Finally, in 1581, another edition was published with illustrations only.9 Lobel’s first book contains the description of about twelve hundred to thirteen hundred plants. The first edition only contained between two and three hundred illustrations; in the editions that followed, the number of illustrations increased successively until Historia plantarum, which contains almost fifteen hundred illustrations, and the 1581 edition that contains almost two thousand.

4In these books we can already feel a sense of natural families; several of them are actually well classified; grasses, orchids, palm trees, and mosses are already well divided and defined, almost as they appear later in modern books. The labiataes,10 the personaes,11 and the umbelliferous12 plants are also put together; but many other plants are still without any order. The disorder is less than in earlier works, however, and we can definitely see some progress. It is especially remarkable to find at the beginning of each section a synoptic table that shows the divisions of plants. These divisions, although they are still not well done, could still lead to the determination of genus and species. Finally, it is in Lobel’s work that we find for the first time the differentiation between the monocotyledonous and the dicotyledonous plants. This separation is fundamental today in botany and just as important as the division in zoology of animals into vertebrates and invertebrates.

5But soon Césalpin13 helped considerably to develop the art of studying plants. This great man was born in Arezzo in 1519; he studied Aristotle’s philosophy14 at a very young age; he even investigated his philosophy in a very general manner in a book called Quaestionum peripateticarum, which he published in Florence in 1569.15 He became doctor to Pope Clement VIII16 and then a professor in Rome where he died in 1603 at the age of eighty-four. Among his books, the one that is of interest to us is De plantis, libri XVI; it was published in Florence in 1583.17 We can see the influence of his thorough study of Aristotle; it is remarkable for its logic and its method; it is basically the work of a genius. Césalpin talks about the structure of plants; he compares their seeds to the eggs of animals and gives the names of male plants to those that bear stamens, and names of female plants to those that have seeds. At that time, people believed the contrary and, still today, people in the countryside call the stem of the hemp that produces the seed a male stem. Césalpin believed that the vital strength of the plant was located in its substance, and that this was where the life of the plant came from; but he deserves that we remember him for being the first one to establish a legitimate division in plants, as botanists say, which is a division based on the characteristics taken directly from the objects they must help to identify. It was a very simple idea but it took several generations before a man would bring it to science.

6Messieurs, what is a method? It is first a way to organize the objects we study so that the ones that share similarities are put together; but, above all, it is a way to learn the names of these objects. The purpose of dictionaries is to give the meaning of words; thus, we need to find in it those words of which we don’t know the meaning. The simplest method to make this research easy is to use as a basis for classification the order of letters of each word. To know about a plant we need to follow a different method; we would not be able to achieve our goals with the use of alphabetical order since this order implies exactly the knowledge of what we ignore. The organization based on economic and medical properties has the same inconvenience; it implies knowledge of the virtues and of the uses of plants whose names we are looking for. Thus, it was necessary to find the specific characteristics of plants that allow their identification within the organization itself of the plants and their parts. This is what Césalpin did. He divided plants into trees and herbs. This is rather a bad division but at least it is easy to see whether a stem is woody or herbaceous; this division is taken directly from the very nature of the plant. Then he subdivided both of these divisions and distributed trees according to the direction of the sprout that contains the seeds. This division has the inconvenience of being difficult to apply; however, it was very useful for the determination of natural families. As for herbs, which are much more numerous, he had to use other criteria; first he subdivided them between those that have seeds and those that do not; then he subdivided plants between those whose seeds are apparent, depending on whether the seeds are solitary or multiple. Those that only have one seed are again subdivided depending on whether this seed is alone in the calix or wrapped in a capsule or a berry. He also subdivides those that have two seeds, depending on whether they are naked in the calix or wrapped in any kind of pericarp. He does the same thing for the species that have three or four seeds. This classification shows some elements of natural method but it is still far from being a complete one. For example, in the species that have three seeds, Césalpin separates those that have a fibrous root from those that have a bulbous root. For those that have a large number of seeds, he subdivides them according to the distribution and composition of its flowers.

7With the use of these subdivisions he managed to create fifteen different classes that are each so well defined that while holding a plant it is impossible not to recognize, with a little bit of study, to which one of these fifteen classes it belongs. Then he established some genera in each class; not the kind of genera that today’s botanists require, far from it; but, once he describes a plant that belongs to one of his classifications he puts with it all the plants that look the most like it, those that have more or less similar flowers and fruits. Thus, Césalpin must be considered a man who helped botany take a second step almost as large as the one we owe to Gessner. This great naturalist established the basis for science, but Césalpin gave to botany a method that later became of the utmost importance for its study. Césalpin knew about fifteen hundred plants, which he named; he had gathered approximately seven hundred and fifty of them, and his herbarium is still maintained today in Florence. It is with these few resources that he established his great classification, but he had to his advantage an excellent logic and the examples of Theophrastus18 and Dioscorides.19 Césalpin ends each chapter of his book with scholarly dissertations on synonymy and the works of the Ancients. He explains Dioscorides, Theophrastus, and Pliny20 as well as his predecessors did; while superior to them in some aspects, he is still their equal on all other aspects.

8While Césalpin’s ideas were correct, as were those of Gessner, they were not generally adopted and several botanists who succeeded him still used the old method.

9One of them was Jacques Daléchamps.21 He was older than Césalpin and when his book was published not long after Césalpin’s book, he had already died; thus, we cannot say that he fought a progress that he would have known. Jacques Daléchamps was born in Caen in 1513 and was a physician in Lyon where he died in 1588. In 1552, he published a Latin version of Athenaeum,22 and in 1587 an edition of Pliny,23 which is one of the best ones of his time. His great work called Historia generalis plantarum was published almost at the time of his death in 1587.24 It is a two-volume folio that covers the huge research this author worked on for more than thirty years, with the help of Johann Bauhin.25 Another botanist, named Jean Desmoulins,26 a doctor in Lyon, also contributed a lot to this book and was even the one who led its publication. It includes two-thousand six-hundred illustrations engraved on wood like the other books I have talked about so far. They represent Lobel’s plants,27 the ones gathered in the East by Rauwolf,28 and those from India that were provided by Acosta.29 Several of these species appear several times with different names, with the purpose of matching the names that had been used in prior works, but also sometimes by ignorance. It also includes about one hundred plants that were new at the time; but this book does not offer all the discernment we would expect. Daléchamps’s classification is vague; it is not based on the nature of plants and does not give enough information that would enable the identification of a plant of which we would not know the name. Daléchamps talks about wild trees, herbs, and fruit trees; then wheat, vegetables, herbs, and apiaceae plants.30 All of a sudden, here is a family that is determined by its characteristics rather than by its uses; but he comes back to the uses and writes a section on fragrant plants. Then he discusses wet-land plants, those that live in dry areas and in rich soils, marine plants, and parasite plants; but all these subdivisions are still based on considerations extraneous to plants. Daléchamps creates a new division based on characters: it includes prickly plants and bulbous plants. He creates another category based on actions and its effects, which includes purgative plants and poisonous plants. Finally, he ends his classifications with foreign plants. This last category is the most absurd of all, because when holding a plant, we cannot know what country it comes from and it is exactly to find out where it comes from that we want to know its name. But these books were used only for their illustrations. Although they were roughly designed, as most of the illustrations engraved on wood were, they still showed some resemblance with the objects they were meant to represent; thus, they were somewhat useful. One flipped through the pages of the book until one would find the illustration of the plant they were looking at. Without these figures, these books would have been useless.

10The same applies to Jacob Theodor Tabernaemontanus31 who was born in 1520 in Bergzabern, a small town from the county of Deux-Ponts.32 He was a disciple of Bock or Tragus33 whom I talked about earlier. He settled in 1553 as an apothecary in Weissemburg in Alsace. He then became a physician and was protected by the Prince Bishop of Spires34 who named him his first physician. When this bishop died, he had to resort to the help of a bookseller from Frankfurt named Bassoeus35 to publish his work. He died in 1589; thus, he was a contemporary of Daléchamps, Césalpin, Lobel, and all the other botanists I talked about, who worked during the same period of time. If the date of publication of their work is slightly different, it is not by much. Tabernaemontanus’s work commenced publication in 1588. The next two volumes did not appear until 1591 because the author died in the meantime. Tabernaemontanus’s book names five thousand eight-hundred plants and provides illustration for two thousand five-hundred. Most of these illustrations were copied, as it had been the case for most of the illustrations represented in the works of Césalpin, Lobel, and Daléchamps. Only thirty of them belong to Tabernaemontanus himself. Furthermore, the number of his illustrations is far too high, as most of them are imaginary.

11We saw how Dioscorides36 overdid it when he assigned virtues to plants. Pliny37 did the same, giving imaginary virtues to each plant. Like them, Tabernaemontanus gathered without discernment everything he could find among the Ancients in this regard. However, at that time, not many other healthier ideas were available and this abundant list of virtues was what made his book famous. It was printed many times, always in German, under the title Neu volkommen kreuter buch (New herbarium).38

12Among all these men who worked with imperfect methods at every possible opportunity —who copied illustrations instead of examining the structure of the plants; who mostly did not take into consideration what Gessner had suggested in terms of observation— only one approached his research differently and used an original method. His name was Fabius Columna, the same Columna I told you about when we studied zoology.39 He was a physician in Naples and belonged to the illegitimate branch of the famous Columna family as you already know. I also told you about his birth and death; he was born in 1567 and died in 1650. He gave us two books. The first one is called Phytobasanos (torture of plants).40 It was published in Naples in 1592 and printed twice during the eighteenth century. Its main purpose was to find, through intense research, which were the plants of the Ancients. As we already mentioned, he came to study botany with the hope of finding a cure to his epilepsy attacks.41 Thus, his research was focused on plants that the Ancients had identified as a cure for this disease; he compared all the books of these authors and looked for the various plants they seemed to refer to, and where the Ancients indicated to have observed them. This work required erudition and sagacity, and Fabius Columna handled it with all the efforts of an ill man who wished to heal himself, yet not with much success.

13The other book written by this author is called Ecphrasis, published in Rome in 1616.42 It is a supplement to his first book. Columna observed plants with as much care as Gessner and with the same approach; he examined fructification in great detail, and illustrated separately, next to the figure of the whole plant, the organs of reproduction. He was the first to introduce in botany the word “petal” to designate the colored leaves that surround the flower. Before him, the divisions of the corolla were called leaves, like the fronds. However, this word “petal” is only the translation in French of the Greek word for leaf.

14Fabius Columna was also the first one to provide illustrations in botany engraved on copper. He had designed and engraved them partly himself; they are quite well done and much more refined as you can imagine than the figures engraved on wood. Thus, Columna made history in science in two ways: by the accuracy of his observations on the organs of fructification and by the refinement of his illustrations.

15Around the same time, in 1613, another book was published that is also remarkable but for a different quality, which is its magnificence. Until now we saw only small figures engraved on wood; the largest ones were those by Fuchs43 that cover a page in-folio and were hand engraved. The book we are now talking about was done by a bishop from Aichstaedt. Basilius Besler published it under the title Hortus Eystettensis;44 it is an atlas in-folio that includes two volumes, published in Nuremberg in 1613. The illustrations cover the whole page and were engraved on copper with great perfection.

16The works done by the moderns are more valuable because the structure of the delicate parts of each plant is represented with more details; other than that they do not offer anything better. Basilius Besler was an apothecary in Nuremberg where he was born in 1561 and where he died in 1629. I already told you that he did not know Latin; thus, to put together his work he received the help of his brother Jerome Besler45 and Ludwig Jungermann,46 a professor in Giessen. Most of these names are probably striking to you because future authors gave these names to plants in recognition for their work, hence the genera Besleria,47 Jungermannia,48 Lobelia,49 etc. The two Besler brothers worked together to write their book under the auspices and financial support of Johann Conrad von Gemmingen50 who was prince and bishop of Aichstaedt. Their work includes three hundred and sixty-five plates, in an atlas format, and one thousand and eighty-six illustrations; all that is missing are the details on the parts related to fructification. Art was flourishing in Germany at that time, which explains the creation of such a beautiful work in this part of Europe. The schools of Cranach51 and Albrecht Dürer52 had trained a large number of artists. Dürer still remained in Nuremberg; he had trained in this town quite a large number of engravers, since he was both a great painter and a great engraver. In fact, Nuremberg was a place where many excellent engravers could be found at that time; thus, it was a great trading place for engravings. Illustrations of natural history were done on a regular basis. However, little by little this art declined; artists were hired to engrave images and illustrations for children; but during the eighteenth century several outstanding works such as those by Knorr53 and Schaeffer54 were published. Next to the Netherlands, Nuremberg was the place where the greatest number of beautiful engravings could be found, but the Netherlands was only second to Nuremberg. Hortus (the Garden) by Besler55 is not a scientific book; it is organized without any method. Plants are ordered according to their growing season; first, those from the spring, then from the summer, autumn, and winter. This division is, however, quite natural for a man who had no education.

17Botany reached the highest level it could reach during the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, thanks to the Bauhin brothers; Linnaeus56 is the only one who can be considered to have surpassed them. Johann Bauhin,57 the elder brother, was born in 1541 in Basel where his father had retired. At the age of eighteen he was already corresponding with Conrad Gessner.58 He went to the University of Tübingen in 1560 to study with Leonhard Fuchs59 whom I talked about in our last lesson as one of the botanists who published the most useful work of that time, especially because of its illustrations. Then Bauhin traveled through Switzerland with Gessner and went to Padua and Montpellier where the two most famous schools of medicine and sciences were located. While in Lyon he became friends with Daléchamps who helped him with the publication of his history of plants. Although his specialty was in the sciences he was appointed professor of rhetoric in Basel because at this time the university had the peculiar habit of drawing the department chairs at random among the various professors; thus, many times several of them were appointed to teach subjects they knew the least. They corrected these random appointments by giving classes that differed from those listed in the curriculum of their assigned chairs.60 In 1570, Bauhin was called by Frederick I, Duke of Württemberg-Montbéliard,61 to become his physician. He remained with him until his death in 1613. This prince was very fond of the sciences; he was a genius, skilled for any great endeavor. He created quite a rich botanical garden that Bauhin directed. Bauhin published either in Montbéliard or in Basel a large number of books on medicine, on topics related to antiquity and zoology; he also wrote a book that describes the Fountain of Boll62 that was discovered in the Duchy of Württemberg; it is the first book to describe in detail thermal medicinal waters. This description not only lists the virtues of the water of Boll, it also lists the plants and animals of that area. Thus, Bauhin describes various species of fruits, and even had engraved various varieties of apples and pears that can be found in that country. This book is the first of its kind that science has ever had. The book by Bauhin that deserves most of our attention, however, is his general natural history of plants. He worked on it with his son-in-law, Johann Heinrich Cherler.63 Only the plan of the book, which is called Historiae plantarum prodromus,64 was published during his lifetime, in 1619. The entire manuscript remained in the hands of his heirs and was not published until thirty eight years after his death, paid by a senator from Bern named François Louis de Graffenried,65 bailiff of Yverdun, and under the management of Chabrey,66 a physician from the same town who was born in Geneva. This book is called Historia plantarum universalis, etc.67 It consists of three folio volumes, containing more than five thousand plants and three thousand five-hundred and seventy illustrations. No other book contained as many illustrations; however, they are small and badly designed. Some of them are even transposed because of the negligence of the editors, but the text is much better than anything that had been published so far. It is written with taste and elegance; the plants are well described and they are easy to identify both from the illustrations and the descriptions. Everything related to criticism of the writings of the Ancients is done with great erudition and the required sagacity. We can say that this work provided the groundwork for everything that has since been written with detail on plants. Ray,68 for example, one of the systematic authors who provided the best division of plants, which was used as a source by future authors, took great advantage of Bauhin’s work. Plants, however, are not classified according to a specific method, such as the one established by Césalpin.69 The author starts with trees, which he divides into fruit trees, nut trees, berry trees, acorn trees, and pod trees. These divisions are based on fruits only. Then he divides herbs among the climbing ones, the Cucurbitaceae,70 the bulbs, legumes, wheat, grass, etc. These divisions represent the beginning of natural families. Plants are gathered in a general manner according to their general structure; but this is not the precise division that enables an accurate determination of a species. Several plants gathered by Bauhin or his son-in-law71 or even by Felix Plater,72 whom I mentioned about when I talked about the history of anatomy, are featured for the first time in his book. While his book is better than those that had been published before —plants are gathered to a certain extent according to their natural relationships, its style is good, and it includes a large number of plants— it is still executed in the same format as its predecessors and is only an improved version of it.

18Gaspard Bauhin,73 brother of the Bauhin we just talked about, deserves more positive comments. Gaspard was nineteen years younger than his brother; he was born in Basel in 1560. Felix Plater,74 who was an erudite botanist and the master in botany to all of northern Europe, was at first his teacher. Then he studied in Padua with Fabricius d’Aquapendente75 whom I talked a lot about in my classes on anatomy. After he traveled all over Italy with Guilandinus,76 he went to Montpellier where it was necessary to go if one wanted to become a famous physician; he studied there for a year and went back to Paris in 1579 and to Basel in 1581. In 1588, he was a professor of Greek. Although Greek was not his specialty he knew it very well; but he managed to exchange his position as a Greek professor for a chair in botany and anatomy. He succeeded Plater in 1614; because of the way things were organized, he was able to teach officially the sciences he had studied for only ten years. His book is called Pinax Theatri botanici or Landscape of the Botanical Scene.77 Under the title Theatrum botanicum78 he designed a work that he planned on publishing, which would have presented a complete history of plants. Only a very small part of this history was published but the table is more valuable than the whole book would have been; it offers consistency in the names used by all prior botanists. At a time when nomenclature was so disorganized and it was impossible to determine with accuracy the name of the plants that the Ancients had listed, each of the thirty or forty botanists I told you about —and several others I did not mention because they were not important enough— would give a different name to the same plant. Bauhn gave a plant a name that was different from the names Lobel or Mattioli would give. It was pure chaos, a complete confusion in which it was impossible to find one’s way around. Gaspard Bauhin wanted to put an end to it and, to that effect, he studied all the authors who preceded him. He tried to compare their illustrations and their descriptions; he examined herbariums as many times as he could and as soon as he was able to recognize the various names applied to the same plant, he wrote them all down, one under the other, thus creating what we call a synonymy. Furthermore, he wrote next to each plant a short sentence describing its main characteristics, to the best of his ability to determine them. Finally, he organized all species under some genera that, while not very well defined, gave some order to the whole. Bauhin’s work was regarded as very valuable; until Linnaeus’s time, when one wanted to describe a plant, only the name, and the brief sentence containing Bauhin’s characters, was used and its reference checked in Bauhin’s Pinax.79 This book made him famous. Linnaeus80 still indicates Gaspard Bauhin’s synonyms in front of his own and disregards all prior works; he only adds those that were published after Bauhin’s Pinax.

19Bauhin spent more than forty years on this book, which names almost six thousand plants. It was printed in Basel in 1623, in one volume in-quarto.

20The classification in some of his books is not always perfect. In the first part, the author talks about grasses; the second is about bulb plants or liliaceaes,81 and the third is about legumes and vegetables, without any consideration for families. He cannot even give a title to his fourth part. He divides each of his parts into chapters in which he gathers plants according to natural aspects, but the genera do not have names; thus, with regard to classification it is almost as imperfect as his predecessors. In his tenth part, he mixes lithophytes and corals with plants; at that time everybody considered them as marine plants; people did not know that they were animal productions.

21Bauhin’s huge flaw was not to cite the pages of the books where he found his sources; thus, it takes a long time to double check what he cites. A large part of the book, whose Pinax is only the table, was written when he died in 1624. His son Johann Gaspard Bauhin82 published the first part from 1658 to 1663; it only contains the plants related to the first two parts of the Pinax, the grasses and liliaceaes; not all of them are there though. It includes two hundred and thirty illustrations, but some of them had already been published by Mattioli. Father Charles Plumier83 dedicated to the Bauhin brothers a genus of plants remarkable for their paired leaves.84 Linnaeus made sure to maintain it.85

22After Gaspard Bauhin’s death, progress in botany and zoology ceased in all of Europe. The reason is mostly to be found in the wars that occurred in almost all of Europe until the middle of the seventeenth century. France suffered the Nine Years’ War,86 which put an end to progress in the sciences; this interruption continued under Henry IV’s tormented reign.87 After this king’s death, civil wars erupted under Louis XIII’s minority,88 then wars against the Protestants, followed by the civil wars of La Fronde89 during Louis XIV’s minority.90

23In England, after the death of King James I,91 disagreements between Charles92 and the Parliament occurred and ended up with a civil war and the death of this unfortunate king. Then came Cromwell’s Protectorate93 and it was only in 1660, the time of the Restoration, when peace came back again in this country.

24In Germany, a war more horrific than the ones I just mentioned occurred between the Catholic and the Protestant States; during a period of thirty years, throats were slit for differences in opinions. This war ruined the Principalities of this empire so much that none of the sovereigns could grant to sciences the protection they had provided before. Italy, compared to its past upheavals, was a little more peaceful; however, it went through the Wars in Lombardy.94

25Spain was the stage of great upheavals; it mostly had to fight the United Provinces that had declared themselves independent republics in 1648. A bloody fight occurred between Spain and Portugal that ended up with Portugal’s independence. But at the end of this war, both countries were exhausted; their relationships with the East Indies and America had been interrupted and this interruption had dramatic consequences on Europe. It is only when the Dutch asserted themselves in their colonies that we started to learn about their natural productions.

26I already told you about Marcgrave,95 one of those who described Brazil’s natural wealth; his book is dated precisely from the end of this period of trouble. It is only at that time that we see new books published and that a new era begins for us, since it is during these troubled times, and maybe under their influence, that these varied societies were shaped, where men worked together to the benefit and progress of human sciences. The Royal Society of London96 was founded under Cromwell97 and several other organizations of this kind were also founded at the same time, as if to be used as a refuge for scholars who always need quietness.

27We still need to study the history of mineralogy and of chemistry for the same period. We will see that mineralogy followed the same steps as zoology and botany; first it dealt with critical research and comments of the Ancients; then it focused on the observations of indigenous and foreign productions; finally it created some methods of classification. Chemistry followed a different route. We could not find its basis in the works of the Ancients; it is in the works of the Middle Ages —where it holds a mysterious character, a different language— that we could find its sources. We will see that this science remained separate for a long time and it is only around the middle of the seventeenth century that it became a branch of the tree of human knowledge, thanks to men gathered in societies and the genius that led these societies.

28After I am done presenting the history of chemistry and of mineralogy in the next two lessons, we will look at all the scientific revolutions that were brought by some great men and the efforts of the various societies of which I described the history.