some extent without design, and the real meaning of this relationship was not yet recognised, other considerations of very various kinds influenced the composition of the books and disturbed the natural arrangement. The feeling for natural affinity supplants all other considerations in de l’Obel first, and after him much more completely in Kaspar Bauhin. Enough perhaps has now been said to render the main result of the botanical efforts of the period, which we are considering, intelligible to the reader; but a clear view of the method of describing plants at that time, and of the way in which systematic botany came into being, can only be shown by examples; and if we proceed to give some here, it is with the purpose with which figures copied as exactly as possible from nature are added to treatises on natural history, because a real understanding is only to be gained in this way. The botanical literature of the 16th century is so different from that of the 19th, that a very indistinct idea of it could be obtained from a statement of results expressed in modern terms. Fuchs, Historia Stirpium, 1542. The common plant now known as Convolvulus arvensis is there called Helxine cissampelos, and is described in the following manner: ‘_Nomina._—Ἑλξινὴ κισσάμπελος Graecis, Helxine cissampelus et Convolvulus Latinis nominatur. Vulgus herbariorum et officinae Volubilem mediam et vitealem appellant, Germani Mittelwinden oder Weingartenwinden. Recte autem Cissampelos dicitur, in vineis enim potissimum nascitur et folio hederaceo. Convolvulus vero quod crebra revolutione vicinos frutices et herbas implicet. _Forma._—Folia habet hederae similia, minora tamen, ramulos exiguos circumplectentes quodcumque contigerint. Folia denique ejus scansili ordine alterna subeunt. Flores primum candidos lilii effigie, dein in puniceum vergentes, profert. Semen angulosum in folliculis acinorum specie. _Locus._—In vineis nascitur, unde etiam ei appellatio cissampeli, ut diximus, indita est. _Tempus._—Aestate, potissimum autem Julio et Augusto mensibus, floret.‘ HIERONYMUS BOCK[11], at page 299 of his ‘Herbal,’ published at Strassburg in 1560, describes the same plant and Convolvulus sepium as follows: ‘Of the white wind-bell.