substance, as in the hazel, the edible chestnut, and all plants that bear catkins; the catkin is in place of a flower, and is a longish body arising from the seat of the fruit, and in this way fruits appear without flowers, for the styles (‘stamina’) form the longer axis of the catkin (‘in amenti longitudinem transeunt’), while the leafy parts and the stamens are changed into its scales. All this shows that the notion of a metamorphosis, of which we find intimations as early as Theophrastus, was a familiar one to Cesalpino, and it fitted in perfectly with his Aristotelian philosophy, while Goethe’s doctrine on the same subject is equally scholastic in its character, and therefore looks strange and foreign in modern science. It has already been observed that Cesalpino includes only the envelopes and stamens under the word flower, and distinguishes the rudiments of the fruit from them; therefore he says that there are plants which produce something in the shape of a catkin, without any hope of fruit, for they are entirely unfruitful; but those which bear fruit have no flowers, as Oxycedrus, Taxus, and among herbs Mercurialis, Urtica, Cannabis, in which the sterile plants are termed male, the fruitful female. Thus he distinguished the cases which we now call dioecious from the previously mentioned monoecious plants, among which he reckons the maize. All this may serve to give the reader some idea, though a very incomplete one, of Cesalpino’s theory; to do him justice, it would be necessary to give a full account of his very numerous, accurate, and often acute observations on the position of leaves, the formation of fruit, the distribution of seeds and their position in the fruit, of his comparative observations on the parts of the fruit in different plants, and above all of his very excellent description of plants with tendrils and climbing plants, of those that are armed with thorns and the like. Though there is naturally much that is erroneous and inexact in his accounts, yet we have before us in the chapters on these subjects the first beginning of a comparative morphology, which quite casts into the shade all that Aristotle and Theophrastus have said on the subject. But the most brilliant portions of his general botany are contained in the 12th, 13th, and 14th chapters, in which he gives the outlines of his views on the systematic arrangement of plants; to prepare the way for what is to follow, he shows first that it is better to give up the four old divisions of the vegetable kingdom, and to unite the shrubs with the trees and the undershrubs with the herbs. But how these genera are to be distinguished into species is, he says, hard to conceive, for the multitude of plants is almost innumerable; there must be many intermediate genera containing the ‘ultimae species,’ but few are as yet known. He then turns to the divisions founded on the relations of plants to men. Such groups, he