Botany, the study of plants, plays a strange role in the history of human knowledge. For many thousands of years it was one field about which humans had little knowledge. It is impossible to know today just what our Stone Age ancestors knew about plants, but from what we can observe of pre - industrial societies that still exists, a detailed learning of plants and their properties must be extremely ancient. This is reasonable. Plants are the basis of the food pyramid for all living things, even for other plants. They have always been enormously important to the good of people, not only for food, but also for clothing, weapons, tools, medicines, housing, and a great many other purposes. Tribes living today in the woods of the Amazon recognize hundreds of plants and know many properties of each. To them botany, as such, has no name and is probably not even recognized as a special branch of “knowledge” at all.
Unfortunately, the more industrialized we become the farther away we move from direct relation with plants, and the less clear our knowledge of botany grows. Yet everyone comes unconsciously on a surprising amount of botanical knowledge, and few people will fail to recognize a rose, an apple, or an orchid When our New Stone Age ancestors, living in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, discovered that certain grasses could be harvested and their seeds planted for richer production the next season, the first great step in a new association of plants and humans was taken. Grains were discovered and from them flowed the marvel of agriculture: planted crops. From then on, humans would increasingly take their living from the controlled production of a few plants, rather than getting a little here and a little there from many varieties that grew wild and the accumulated knowledge of tens of thousands of years of experience and close relations with plants in the wild would begin to fade away.

植物学，一种对植物的研究，在人类获得知识的历史中发挥了奇怪的作用。数千年来，它都是一个人类所知甚少的领域。我们不可能知道我们石器时代的祖先究竟知道什么有关植物的知识，但是我们可以看到，在依然存在的前工业社会遗址中，一份详细的对植物及其性能的学习计划必定是极其古老的。这很合理。植物是食物金字塔的基础——对所有生物，甚至对其它植物来说都是如此。它们对人类的健康一直都极为重要，不仅作为粮食，而且可以作为服装、武器、工具、药品、住房，以及相当多的其它用途。今天生活在亚马逊流域丛林中的部落识得数以百计的植物以及每种植物的多项性能。对他们来说，这样的“植物学”没有名字，并且他们可能根本没有认识到植物学是一个特殊的“知识体系”的分枝。

不幸的是，随着工业化的推进，我们与植物直接关系越来越远，我们的植物学知识的增长也越来越不明显。然而，每个人都不自觉地拥有令人惊奇的大量植物学知识，很少人会不认识玫瑰、苹果或兰花。当我们那些大约一万年前生活在中东的新石器时期祖先发现某些种类的草可收获和播种，并在下一季节获得更大丰收的时候，他们迈出了植物和人类崭新联系的第一大步。谷物的发现成就了农业的奇葩：种植作物。自此，人类越来越多地以控制一些植物的生产来达到食物增产的效果，而不是到处采集各种野生品种，而多年的经验所积累的知识及与野生植物的密切关系则开始消失。