Vegetable. See PLANTS, BOTANY, BIOLOGY, GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION, &c. For Vegetable Chemistry, see VEGETABLE PHYSIOLOGY; for Vegetable Histology, see TISSUES, BARK, BAST, LEAF, WOOD, &c.; for Vegetable Marrow, see GOURD; and see also IVORY (VEGETABLE) and PARCHMENT. The general history of classifications of the 'Vegetable Kingdom' is given in the articles BOTANY and BIOLOGY, and the details of the great divisions will be found under ALGÆ, FUNGI, MOSSES, FERNS, GYMNOSPERMS, MONOCOTYLEDONS, DICOTYLEDONS. The student will find an excellent account of the older classifications of Linnæus, De Jussieu, De Candolle, Endlicher, and Eichler in Leunis' Synopsis der Pflanzenkunde (1883). Recent progress has in part been due to the influence of replacing long verbal descriptions by diagrams, introduced by De Candolle and greatly developed by Eichler in his Blüthendiagramme, which led to better classifications from a purely morphological standpoint. The effect of evolutionary ideas may be traced in Warming's Haandbog i den systematiske Botanik (German trans. Berlin, 1890). No quite satisfactory classification of plants has yet been constructed, nor indeed can one well be until a thoroughly evolutionary point of view is adopted.
The student may consult text-books such as Bentley's Manual of Botany; Henfrey's Botany; Asa Gray's Botany; Goebel's Outlines of Classification and Special Morphology (Oxford, 1887); Hooker's translation of Lemaout and Decaisne's Botany; Van Tieghem's Traité de Botanique (Paris, 1891); Kerner's Pflanzenleben; and for fuller information the great works—Bentham and Hooker's Genera Plantarum, Baillon's Histoire des Plantes, and Engler and Prantl's Pflanzenfamilien. For local plants he should consult the various floras, of which we may cite as typical Rabenhorst's Deutsche Kryptogamen-Flora. Of elaborate monographs, Saccardo's Sylloge Fungorum may be mentioned as typical and very complete.