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It has been claimed, with considerable reason, that classification or taxonomy of living beings is as old as human thought itself, existing since even the lowest organisms respond differently to a varied environment and effectively order their own world. It is reasonable to expect that such an ancient and universal activity, until the most primitive human tribes or scientists alike, should have developed into a precise and unambiguous technique. It is, therefore, surprising that it still is not so. It is, therefore, surprising that despite a general agreement as to the categories represented by the birds of the earth, it is still not uncommon for different authors to arrive at altogether different classifications. At times, one may be evaluated more by the reputation of their author than in their approximation to reality. One of the reasons for this is probably the fact that even truly essential science has not yet reached more than a fraction of the birds of the world, so that empirical studies still predominate with their inevitable tendency towards authoritarianism.

It must necessarily be realized that the method of approach to any scientific problem is clearly of utmost importance. It will to a large extent determine the kind of discovery made. Or, to put the matter the other way round, the method of approach is itself largely dictated by the type of answer one wants to obtain; it is, in fact, also a kind of question. Furthermore, the question will alter with time and the progress of discovery, so that when one method has yielded the main cogging answers that it could be expected to provide, then it is time to ask another kind of question by adopting new methods.

This is just what has happened in the field of plant taxonomy, where the original approach is inevitably descriptive, because botanists set out to describe as fully and accurately as possible the variety of forms of the phenomena which they exhibit. This approach is designed to answer the basic question about what we, the facts, though it needs categories or divisions of all kinds of studies, these are rather arbitrarily chosen and hardly need to be more closely defined.

The descriptive method is soon supplemented by the comparative. This is first focused around the question of grouping or classification, because we need to know what pattern a system or arrangement of organisms has in common and what distinct types there are at various levels of characterization. This leads to classification of organisms in a hierarchical system of categories which have to be more or less exactly defined, although the degree of arbitrariness cannot be avoided.