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Egenis seminar series. In recent years, there has been a profusion of studies charting the history of tree diagrams in natural history and biological systematics. Whereas some of these have focused on one or a few arboreal schemes, the majority have presented long histories, spanning centuries and occasionally even millennia. Early or ?€?pre-Darwinian?€? trees typically feature in these histories as precursors to phylogenetics; sometimes even as the ?€?roots?€? of later trees. Together with colleagues in France, I have previously argued that one of the most frequently cited early tree diagrams, Augustin Augier?€?s ?€?Botanical Tree?€? (1801), cannot in any reasonable way be made to play the role of forerunner to later, evolutionary trees?€¡±even as the author pitched his tree of natural families in explicitly genealogical terms. In this talk, I push the argument further by proposing an alternative reading of the historical record. Starting from Augier?€?s tree and other early examples, I argue that ?€?pre-evolutionary?€? trees should be understood less in terms of what came after, and more in terms of what came before. Attending to the functions they performed as keys, ladders, and maps, I argue that early trees were logical, rhetorical, and mnemonic devices drawn to imagine perfect, static order.