The germs of botanical science are to be sought for in the rudimentary state in very remote antiquity. In the sacred writings we meet with constant allusions to the vegetable world. The cultivators of the science among the early Greeks and Romans were not botanists, but Rhizotomæ, or root-cutters, since they directed their attention to the roots in search of medicinal properties. Aristotle of Stagira, who lived in the fourth century before our era, may be regarded as the founder of botany; Mithridates, and the younger Juba, King of Mauritania, were among its cultivators. They established botanic gardens, some probably from love of the science, others of them in order to cultivate the deadly plants from which poisonous juices were obtained. Nicander of Colophon, Cato, Varro, Columella, Virgil, Pedanius Dioscorides of Cilicia, and lastly, the elder Pliny, all dwell upon the wonders of vegetation; and war, notwithstanding its desolating tendencies, was made to promote the interests of science. To the Arabians of the Twelfth Century we are next indebted for our knowledge of botany. After them the darkness of the Middle Ages sets in, and it is only since the illustrious Venetian, Marco Polo, came to examine and describe the wonders of the East that the darkness has been dispelled. He examined the treasures of Asia and the east coast of Africa, described many plants of India and the Indian Ocean, and from his day to the present our knowledge of the names of plants, as well as of their structure and physiology, has been continually on the increase. The science of botany, as now understood, can not be held, however, to date further back than two centuries. In the year 1682 Nehemiah Grew published his _Anatomy of Plants_. In 1684 the French botanist Tournefort, then professor of botany at the Jardin des Plantes, published his _Elements of Botany_, being the first attempt to define the exact limits of genera in vegetables. Most of the genera established by Tournefort remain, proving the correctness of the formula from which he deduced their common characters. Tournefort succeeded to a large extent in unraveling the chaos into which the science of botany had been plunged from the days of Theophrastus and Dioscorides. Separating genera and species according to their characteristics, he described no less than 698 genera and 10,146 species. He published, at the same time, a system for the classification of plants, eminently attractive, especially if we connect it with the times in which it appeared. The French botanist directed the attention of observers, probably for the first time, to those parts of plants most likely to excite admiration, namely, the different forms of the corolla.