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Goldstine: One has to accept their classifications and see why it works.

Wooster: There is no real grammar for any particular language. Similarly taxonomy is defined as that which the taxonomist can remember.

Macy: One of the unanswered questions is the criteria for knowing when you have as good or better answer.

Cronquist: The present scheme could not be completely at cross purposes with what ought to be the best. Any two things that can cross and produce offspring must be pretty closely related. There is no known example of a hybridization between things which are regularly put into different plant families. As soon as you get to the family level, there are no hybrids. There are some at the genus level. If the scheme were set up wrongly, we would have hybrids between families, between classes, etc.

Rogers: Several of the participants have felt that there is a lack of basic information on the nature of taxonomy. We have therefore drafted Dr. Keck to make a generalized statement about the activities in taxonomy over the years and its present thinking. We appreciate the fact that Dr. Keck is willing to enter the discussion without giving him any advanced warning.

Dr. Keck: Attempts at classification of plants have been made for at least 2000 years, and the first efforts were by the Greeks. The needed classifications were quite simple, and served whatever purposes were required for a number of centuries. More or less intensive investigations of the classifications were begun about 200 years ago, and Linnaeus' works were the most significant attempt to make a more orderly system. Though Linnaeus' taxonomy was, by modern standards, completely artificial, his consistent application of a binomial naming system has proved to be one of the most useful techniques. His work stimulated study by many other biologists, and classification of plants was put onto a reasonable, "natural" basis by the middle of the 19th century, before the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species." It is interesting to note that, though there was no explanation of why the organisms could be placed together in a natural system, they were more or less organized into essentially an evolutionary system before Darwin's publication. This is not intended to indicate that the system established over a century ago was a perfect reflection of our ideas of evolution of plants today, but only that the evolutionary relationship of many of the major groups of plants were already obvious.

In the analysis of a group of plants for purposes of classification, the taxonomist employs information from the plants in whatever form is useful. In many cases, the establishment of a classification is dependent on information subsidiary to the plants themselves. Thus, geographic distribution and habitat information frequently are fundamental, and the knowledge that one group of organisms may have a world-wide distribution, as is the case of the members of the family Rosaceae, may be critical for understanding the taxonomy of a group.