PREFACE

These circumstances impelled me to investigate more inquisitively and to look more deeply into the origin, nature, and use of Method: the systematic classification of plants into groups based on shared characteristics in general, and to compare our own system more diligently with the Methods of others, so that I might more clearly discern and more certainly judge which should be preferred.

Having finally weighed all these factors properly, I discovered that it is impossible to divide all plants into genera or classes based on any single part alone—whether that be the flower or the fruit—without doing violence to Nature; that is, without separating plants that are clearly related, or grouping those that are foreign to one another. Consequently, neither the Rivinian Method—which is taken from the number of petals in a flower and its regularity or irregularity—nor the Tournefortian—which takes the differences of genera from the diverse structure or form of the flower—satisfies us. Nor are we satisfied by the method followed by Dr. Hermann Paul Hermann (1646–1695), a German physician and botanist in the distribution of vessel-bearing: plants that produce seed pods or capsules (Latin: Vasculiferarum) plants, which is sought from the simplicity of the seed vessel and its division into two, three, four, or six cells or compartments.

I. For, in the first place, the Rivinian Method pulls apart the plants we call Bulbous herbs and their relatives into different genera. Yet no one—unless they are a slave to a hypothesis original Greek: ὑποθέσει δουλεύει (hypothesei douleuei)—would fail to recognize that these are of the same kind. For some of them possess a regular flower, others an irregular one; likewise, some are single-petaled original: monopetalon, and others many-petaled original: polypetalon. Nor is this true only of the Bulbous plants,