Botany.

Date:
1826
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Botany. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/72 (page 370)
    to the Roman army, he traversed Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor, in which countries he collected many new plants. But, in his history, he des¬ cribed by far the greater part of those he mentions, upon the authority of others. He was acquainted with no method of arranging his plants, which were frequently classed from some similarity in their names, rather than in their nature. His descriptions are so imperfect, that the name only is given of many plants. His catalogue, however, of the plants of Greece and Italy, was by far the most complete which had been compiled in his day. 41. He was followed by Caius Plinius Secun- dus, who was born in the twenty-third year of our era, under Tiberius Caesar. The fame of this remarkable man has reached to all the cor¬ ners of the civilised earth, and he is on all hands pronounced to have been the father of natural history. He was a person of great learning, considerable acuteness, and unwearied industry. His reading was more extensive than that of any of his predecessors or contemporaries, and his writings are reported to have been scarcely less voluminous. Judging from the books upon natural history, which have come down to our time, his high reputation may be stated to have been very little deserved, except on the score of industry. They chiefly consist of almost literal compilations from the works of his predecessors, especially of Dioscorides. The arrangement of the matter is uncertain and empirical; the des¬ criptions of his subjects meagre, vague, and unsa¬ tisfactory ; the qualities assigned to them fanciful, childish, and unphilosophical. The advantages he possessed of having visited the most remote of the Roman provinces, in the capacity of a general officer, were turned to small account by him in discovering new objects of natural history. In a word he must be pronounced to have been a mere compiler without observation, experience, or judgment. 42. Galen succeeded Pliny, and turned the great powers of his mind to the subject of botany, but in a medical view only. So that a few new plants were all which natural science derived from his labors. 43. Thus much has been said upon the state of botanical knowledge up to the time of Galen, in order to make it appear what was the actual amount of discoveries during the first epoch of natural science. It is worthy of remark, that the period was fraught with fanciful conjectures, and often ingenious hypotheses ; but that philosophy was unaided by experience, and that metaphy¬ sical speculations usurped the place of accurate observations. 44. In the early ages of the world, the science therefore, which is now called botany, consisted of a collection of names, and exceedingly imper¬ fect descriptions of plants; either entirely un¬ arranged, or combined according to their supposed qualities in medicine, or in human economy. 45. The race of botanists who succeeded the classics, were physicians or mere simplers, who cared for no classification beyond that which enabled them to arrive at an imaginary knowledge of the powers and effects of the few herbs which were imported for pharmacy, or which grew in their vicinity. Even after the revival of learning in Europe, the same ideas were entertained, and a proportional progress was made in the acqui¬ sition of knowledge. The second race of botanists, or those who existed after the dark ages of Europe had passed away, were the com¬ mentators upon the writings of the first race; men of some learning, indeed, but in the deepest ignorance of the subject they undertook to illus¬ trate ; monks, whose practical knowledge exten¬ ded not beyond the walls of their monastery, and who depended for all the information they found necessary to their purposes, upon the assistance they could derive from the few copies of the Arabian physicians, which their own or their monastic libraries might chance to possess. Science in the hands of such men, would, it may be easily believed, retrograde rather than make advances towards improvement. So that, up to the time of Vincentius Bellovacensis, who has been called the Pliny of the middle ages, and whose Speculum Quadripartitum was published in 1494, the second volume of which is devoted to the subject of natural history, it may be safely affirmed, that no progress whatever, in modern times, had been made in botany; the whole of this author’s materials having been borrowed from Aristotle, Dioscorides, Isidorus Macer, Pliny, Avicenna, Platearius Actor, and Cassius Felix, an obscure writer, whose works are lost. But the prac¬ tical ignorance of the monks was not the only evil which impeded the advance of physical know¬ ledge. They were in many instances deplorably unlearned in the languages from which they borrowed their opinions. With Arabic, the only source to them of new ideas, they w^re in most instances imperfectly acquainted : and the degree of knowledge which they possessed, even in the Greek language, was so low, that they were led into the commission of continual errors, in translating the fables of classical writers into the dreams of themselves. Another and a more serious consequence than the decline of science, was the result of this deplorable state of botanical learning, which, as a modern writer has justly observed, was so desperate that it is not more sur¬ prising that it should have arrived at it, than that it should ever have been extricated from it. By a frequent misinterpretation of the Arabic wri¬ ters, it not unfrequently came to pass, that pro¬ perties were ascribed to plants which were directly the reverse of those which the original authors attributed to them ; a curious instance of which occurred with respect to the cinnamon. This was for a long time considered a deadly poison, in consequence of Nicolaus Myrepsicus, a Greek physician, who flourished in the thirteenth century, having translated dar-sini the name given to the cinnamon by the Arabians, by the word apatviKov. 46. The time, -however, arrived, when some truly learned men undertook the exposition, not only of the blunders of their contemporaries, but of the ignorance or corrupt text of those original authors in whom a blind confidence had for so many ages been reposed. The bold attack of Hermolaus Barbarus upon Pliny, and of Ni¬ colaus Leonicenus upon Serapio, and the Arabian