Botany
Botany is the study of plants and includes plant classification, structure, physiology, and economic importance within human society. In the strictest sense, botany is the study of those organisms containing chlorophyll, however for historical reasons, it generally includes the study of non-chlorophyll-containing organisms such as the fungi.
Historically, the formal study of botany can be traced to the ancient Greeks and Romans. For them, botany was merely a part of the study of nature and natural history, rather than a distinct subject in its own right. Botany as a formal and separate subject did not exist until the mid-seventeenth century. The word botany comes from the Greek word botane, meaning plant or pasture.
At its inception, botany consisted of a purely comparative physical system in which plants were grouped together by appearance. Early in botany's history, the doctrine of signatures was used to classify plants. This stated that plants or plant parts that resembled areas of the human body could be used to treat disease in those areas. For example, a walnut with its wrinkled appearance was considered useful in the treatment of brain diseases. Increasingly, usage was considered along with physiology when classifying plants. It was not until the the mid-eighteenth century when Carl Linnaeus was compiling the framework for modern classification of plant and animal species that the modern era of botany truly began. With the advent of the microscope, botany expanded to include a thorough investigation of plant anatomy and cell structure. At this point, botany was still an important subject for the clergy and very few professional botanists existed.
Many early botanists were merely collectors and recorders, and up until the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, much that was written about plants was merely copied from earlier studies of natural history. Mostly passed from the Greeks and Romans, plant information included the diagrams which became increasingly stylized and less accurate. With the invention of the printing press, herbals (documents on plants) with new and more accurate illustrations became available. New and original research became more common, and with the advent of the Renaissance, the production of botanical illustrations became more scientifically accurate.
Modern botany now makes use of a whole range of tools that have revolutionized the subject. These range from the molecular tools of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) investigation to micropropagation and a more holistic approach to the subject. Modern botany is just as interested in the range of organisms within a habitat and their interactions as with single plants. Ecology is an ever present underlying principle. There is much basic botanical research that remains to be accomplished. Many new plant species wait for discovery; many plants need to be further investigated for possible uses; molecular work needs to be done on the vast majority of plants; there is still much to be done on the taxonomy and evolutionary relationships between plants. In 1998, botanists at Kew Gardens in England produced a new classification of the plant world, which moved a large number of plant families into different orders. This re-evaluation of the taxonomy of the plants was based on an investigation of the DNA of the species examined. In total, three genes were examined from each family, and the similarity between these genes was considered. The more similar the gene sequence was the closer related were the plant families.
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