UNSYSTEMATIC KNOWLEDGE. 369 



Platonic form of dialogue), has still the character of a commentary on 

 the ancients. 



The Germans appear to have been the first to liberate themselves 

 from this thraldom, and to publish works founded mainly on actual 

 observation. The first of the botanists who had this great merit is 

 Otho Brunfels of Mentz, whose work, Herbarum Vivce Icones, appeared 

 in 1530. It consists of two volumes in folio, with wood-cuts; and in 

 1532, a German edition was published. The plants which it contains 

 are given without any arrangement, and thus he belongs to the period 

 of unsystematic knowledge. Yet the progress towards the forma- 

 tion of a system manifested itself so immediately in the series of Ger- 

 man botanists to which he belongs, that we might with almost equal 

 propriety transfer him to the history of that progress ; to which we 

 now proceed. 



CHAPTER III. 

 FORMATION OF A SYSTEM OF ARRANGEMENT OF PLANTS. 



Sect. 1. Prelude to the Epoch of Ccesalpinus. 



THE arrangement of plants in the earliest works was either arbi- 

 trary, or according to their use, or some other extraneous circum- 

 stance, as in Pliny. This and the division of vegetables by Dioscorides 

 into aromatic, alimentary, medicinal, vinous, is, as will be easily seen, 

 a merely casual distribution. The Arabian writers, and those of the 

 middle ages, showed still more clearly their insensibility to the nature 

 of system, by adopting an alphabetical arrangement ; which was em- 

 ployed also in the Herbals of the sixteenth century. Brunfels, as we 

 have said, adopted no principle of order ; nor did his successor, Fuchs. 

 Yet the latter writer urged his countrymen to put aside their Arabian 

 and barbarous Latin doctors, and to observe the vegetable kingdom for 

 themselves ; and he himself set the example of doing this, examined 

 plants with zeal and accuracy, and made above fifteen hundred draw- 

 ings of them. 1 



1 His Historia Stirpium was published at Basil in 1542. 

 VOL. II. 21 



