Delphinidin

The study of plants, called botany—from three Greek words botanikos (botanical), botane (plant or herb), and boskein (to feed), and the French word botanique (botanical)—appears to have had its origins with Stone Age peoples who tried to modify their surroundings and feed themselves. At first, the interest in plants was mostly practical and centered around how plants might provide food, fibers, fuel, and medicine. Eventually, however, an intellectual interest arose.

Individuals became curious about how plants reproduced and how they were put together. This inquisitiveness led to plant study becoming a science, which broadly defined is simply “a search for knowledge of the natural world.” Botanists are scientists who study plants. A science is distinguished from other fields of study by several features. It involves the observation, recording, organization, and classification of facts, and more importantly, it involves what is done with the facts. Scientific procedure involves the process of experimentation, observation, and the verifying or discarding of information, chiefly through inductive reasoning from known samples.

There is no universal agreement on the precise details of the process. A few decades ago, scientific procedure was considered to involve a routine series of steps that involved first asking a question, then formulating a hypothesis, followed by experiments, and finally developing a theory. This series of steps came to be known as the scientific method, and there are still instances where such a structured approach works well. In general, however, the scientific method now describes the procedures of assuming and testing hypotheses.