phytologists

It is a marvellous fact, whose full meaning we can as yet but imperfectly comprehend, that myriads of ages ere there existed a human mind, well nigh the same principles of classification now developed by man's intellect in our better treatises of zoology and botany, were developed on this earth by the successive geologic periods; and that the by-past productions of our planet, animal and vegetable, were chronologically arranged in its history, according to the same laws of thought which impart regularity and order to the works of the later naturalist and phytologists.

The Testimony of the Rocks or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed Hugh Miller 1829

In an age in which a class of writers not without their influence in the world of letters would fain repudiate every argument derived from _design_, and denounce all who hold with Paley and Chalmers as anthropomorphists, that labor to create for themselves a god of their own type and form, it may be not altogether unprofitable to contemplate the wonderful parallelism which exists between the Divine and human systems of classification, and -- remembering that the geologists who have discovered the one had no hand in assisting the naturalists and phytologists who framed the other -- soberly to inquire whether we have not a new argument in the fact for an identity in constitution and quality of the Divine and human minds, -- not a mere fanciful identity, the result of a disposition on the part of man to imagine to himself a God bearing his own likeness, but an identity real and actual, and the result of that creative act by which

The Testimony of the Rocks or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed Hugh Miller 1829