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Page 217 · DO #4666 · 231_Rogers_Bx2FF27_r
- Collection
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David James Rogers (1918–2007) papers
- Item/Folder
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Taximetrics Course - Student Reports, 1966–1968
- Digital Object
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DO #4666,
page 217
- Collection-level dates
- 1948–1977
Page transcription
page 5
where within a limited locality such as southern Greece, people made classifications and their classifications would be on life form essentially to start with. That is, some of the earlier classifications divide plants on the basis of trees, shrubs, and herbs. And for that particular locality, such a classification would have some sort of merit. In other words, you could put a plant into some package or other. If you moved from that particular area, as frequently as people might have, and tried to use the same sort of classification, we might discover that we had some discontinuities that would fit into such a picture, but that we had considerable amount of difficulty in moving from one area to another because the objects to be put into the classification would obviously not be the same as the ones as you would have had say in southern Greece. However, that kind of a classificatory system apparently satisfied for quite a long time, if we think mxr of classification purely in terms of taxonomy. There are other kinds of classifications obviously that were made. For instance there were discoveries of food plants which is a kind of categorization. There were discoveries of medicinal plants that had some merit, perhaps there were classifications of poisonous plants that we would be able to use even in those early days, although they were not formalized as classifications. But these types of classifications did indeed exist very early. Only as we moved into the latter parts of the dark ages and so forth and indeed find people beginning to investigate things about them with more freedom, do we change this kind of a classificatory system. One of the very earliest people that was interested ;in classification are, at least made some descriptions which sound to us like normal things, was an Italian by the name of Cesalpino. I don't care whether you remember Mr. Cesalpino's name or not, but one of the things that Mr. Cesalpino did was to discover that there were some plants more like that each other because of the characters/they had than they were like other plants.