ABSTRACT
Aristotle was the father of biology and in particular, classification. He used the concepts of genus and species to designate a biological entity within the framework of his Categories and to classify his Substances “in a gigantic burgeoning of beings”. The cultivation of plants in greenhouses in large metropolitan botanical gardens, a reflection of the ongoing colonial expansion, and advances in the means of observation led to a deeper knowledge of anatomy and physiology. An abundant quantity of molecular characters can be analysed only because of the development of powerful means of calculating, i.e., of bioinformatics. In botany, chloroplast DNA is widely used. The plastid genome is small but is found in very large quantity in plant cells. In 1993, M. W. Chase, D. E. Soltis, R. G. Olmstead, and others conducted a cladistic analysis of 500 DNA sequences representing all the plants with seeds.
