In the history of botanical classification, the first advance from the purely utilitarian standpoint was marked by the recognition of the fact that the structure and mode of life of the plants themselves are of importance. In the work of writers such as Dodoens and d’Aléchamps, to take two typical examples, we find the issues curiously confused by the working of three different principles side by side; that is to say, by the simultaneous insistence (i) on the habitat, (ii) on the “virtues,” and (iii) on the structure, as affording clues to the systematic position of the plant in question. The herbalist thus erects his scheme on a basis consisting of a confused medley of ecological, medical, and morphological principles. An enumeration of the eighteen headings, under which d’Aléchamps, in 1586, described the vegetable kingdom, so far as it was then known, will show the perplexities which surrounded the first gropings after a natural system. His headings may be translated as follows:— I. Of trees which grow wild in woods. II. Of fruits growing wild in thickets and shrubberies. III. Of trees which are cultivated in pleasure gardens and orchards. IV. Of cereals and pulse, and the plants which grow in the field with them. V. Of garden herbs and pot herbs. VI. Of umbelliferous plants. VII. Of plants with beautiful flowers. VIII. Of fragrant plants. IX. Of plants growing in marshes. X. Of plants growing in rough, rocky, sandy and sunny places. XI. Of plants growing in shady, wet, marshy and fertile places. XII. Of plants growing by the sea, and in the sea itself. XIII. Of climbing plants. XIV. Of thistles and all spiny and prickly plants. XV. Of plants with bulbs, and succulent and knotty roots. XVI. Of cathartic plants. XVII. Of poisonous plants. XVIII. Of foreign plants. Among these eighteen groups, the only ones which have any pretension to being natural are VI (Umbellifers) and XIV (Thistles), and these merely approximate roughly to related groups of genera. Among the Umbellifers we meet with _Achillea_ and other genera which do not really belong to the order, whilst, with the Thistles, there are grouped other spiny plants, such as _Astragalus tragacantha_, which, in a natural system, would occupy a place remote from the Composites. [Illustration: Text-fig. 68. “Ninfea” = Waterlily [Durante, Herbario Nuovo, 1585].]