The descriptions of species in the ‘Prodromus Theatri Botanici’ of KASPAR BAUHIN (1620) notice all obvious parts of the plant with all possible brevity and in a fixed order; the form of the root, height and form of the stem, characters of the leaves, flowers, fruit, and seed are given in concise sentences seldom occupying more than twenty short lines; the description of a single species is here in fact developed into an art and becomes a diagnosis. A still higher value must be set on the fact, that in Kaspar Bauhin the distinction between species and genus is fully and consciously carried out; every plant has with him a generic and a specific name, and this binary nomenclature, which Linnaeus is usually thought to have founded, is almost perfectly maintained by Bauhin, especially in the ‘Pinax’; it is true that a third and fourth word is not unfrequently appended to the second, the specific name, but this additional word is evidently only an auxiliary. It is remarkable on the other hand, that he has added no characters to the names of the genera; it is only from the name that we know that several species belong to one genus; we might almost believe that the characters of the genus are intended to be supplied by the strange etymological explanation appended in italics to the generic name. These fanciful etymologies maintained themselves to the end of the 17th century, when Tournefort did battle with them; they were an evil which sprang in a great measure from Aristotelian and scholastic modes of thought, and from the belief that it was possible to conceive of the nature of a thing from the original meaning of its name.