It is interesting to notice that Cole, though he seems to the modern reader very credulous on the subject of the signatures of plants, was completely sceptical as to the association of astrology and botany. The main argument by which he tries to discredit it is an ingenious one. The knowledge of herbs is, he says, “a subject as antient as the Creation (as the Scriptures witnesse) yea more antient then the Sunne, or Moon, or Starres, they being created on the fourth day, whereas Plants were the third. Thus did God even at first confute the folly of those Astrologers, who goe about to maintaine that all vegitables in their growth, are enslaved to a necessary and unavoidable dependance on the influences of the Starres; Whereas Plants were, even when Planets were not.” CHAPTER IX CONCLUSIONS A General review of the subjects discussed in the foregoing chapters brings home to us several results of some interest. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the incalculable debt which Botany owes to Medicine. An overwhelming majority of the herbalists were physicians, who were led to the study of botany on account of its connection with the arts of healing. As we have already pointed out, medicine gave the original impulse, not only to Systematic Botany, but also to the study of the Anatomy of Plants. However, as the evolution of the herbal proceeded, we have shown that botany rose from being a mere hand-maid of medicine to a position of comparative independence. This is well exemplified in the history of plant classification. When the early medical botanists attempted any arrangement of their material, it was on a purely utilitarian basis; the herbs were merely classified according to the qualities which made them of value to man. But as the science grew, the need of a more systematic classification began to make itself felt, and in some of the works published in the latter half of the period we are considering, there is a distinct, if only partially successful, attempt to group the plants according to the affinities which they present when considered in themselves, and not in relation to man. The ideal of a natural system in the Vegetable Kingdom, in which each plant should find its inevitable place, must have been clear for instance to de l’Obel, when he wrote in the ‘Adversaria,’ of “an order, than which nothing more beautiful exists in the heavens, or in the mind of a wise man[44].” Second only to the debt of botany to medicine is its debt to certain branches of the fine arts, more especially wood-engraving. The draughtsman and engraver not only disseminated the knowledge of plants, but their work must often have revealed to the botanist features which had escaped his less highly educated and subtle eye.