When we turn from the botanical philosophers to the herbalists proper, we find an altogether different state of affairs. The Aristotelian botanists were conscious, from the beginning, of the philosophic necessity for some form of classification. The medical botanists, on the other hand, were only interested in plants as individuals, and were driven to classify them merely because some sort of arrangement was necessary for convenience in dealing with a large number of kinds. The first Materia Medica, that of Dioscorides, shows some attempt at order, but the arrangement is seldom at all natural. Occasionally the author groups together plants which are nearly related, as when he treats of a number of Labiates, or of Umbellifers successively—but this is rare. [Illustration: Text-fig. 64. “Buglossa” [Ortus Sanitatis, Mainz, 1491].] Pliny was not, strictly speaking, a medical botanist, but at the same time he may be mentioned in this connection, since his interest in plants was essentially utilitarian. Like Theophrastus, he begins his account of plants with the trees, but his reason for so doing is profoundly different from that of the Greek writer, and illustrates the divergence between what we may call the anthropocentric and the scientific outlook upon the plant world. Theophrastus placed trees at the head of the vegetable kingdom, because he considered their organisation the highest, and most completely expressive of plant nature; Pliny, on the other hand, began with trees because of their great value and importance to man. As an example of his ideas of arrangement, we may mention that he places the Myrtle and Laurel side by side, because the Laurel takes a corresponding place in triumphs to that accorded to the Myrtle in ovations! Turning to the herbals themselves, we find that the earliest show no trace of a natural grouping, the plants being, as a rule, arranged alphabetically. This is the case, for instance, in the Latin and German Herbarius, the Ortus Sanitatis and their derivatives, and even in the herbals of Brunfels and of Fuchs in the sixteenth century. In Bock’s herbal, on the other hand, the plants are grouped as herbs, shrubs and trees, according to the classical scheme. The author evidently made some effort, within these classes, to arrange them according to their relationships. In the preface to the third edition he writes—“I have placed together, yet kept distinct, all plants which are related and connected, or otherwise resemble one another and are compared, and have given up the former old rule or arrangement according to the A.B.C. which is seen in the old herbals. For the arrangement of plants by the A.B.C. occasions much disparity and error.”