UNSYSTEMATIC KNOWLEDGE. 367 



He would ope his leathern scrip, 

 And show me simples of a thousand names, 

 Telling their strange and vigorous faculties. 



MILTON, Comu*. 



Where the subject of our history is so entirely at a stand, it ia 

 anprofitable to dwell on a list of names. The Arabians, small as their 

 science was, were able to instruct the Christians. Their writings were 

 translated by learned Europeans, for instance Michael Scot, and Con- 

 stantine of Africa, a Carthaginian who had lived forty years among 

 the Saracens," and who died A.D. 1087. Among his works, is a Trea- 

 tise, De Gradibus, which contains the Arabian medicinal lore. In the 

 thirteenth century occur Encyclopaedias, as that of Albertus Magnus, 

 and of Vincent of Beauvais ; but these contain no natural history except 

 traditions and fables. Even the ancient writers were altogether 

 perverted and disfigured. The Dioscorides of the middle ages varied 

 materially from ours." Monks, merchants, and adventurers travelled 

 far, but knowledge was little increased. Simon of Genoa," a writer on 

 plants in the fourteenth century, boasts that he perambulated the East 

 in order to collect plants. "Yet in his Clams Sanationis" says a 

 modern botanical writer, 23 " we discover no trace of an acquaintance 

 with nature. He merely compares the Greek, Arabic, and Latin 

 names of plants, and gives their medicinal effect after his predeces- 

 sors :" so little true is it, that the use of the senses alone necessarily 

 leads to real knowledge. 



Though the growing activity of thought in Europe, and the revived 

 acquaintance with the authors of Greece in their genuine form, were 

 gradually dispelling the intellectual clouds of the middle ages, yet 

 during the fifteenth century, botany makes no approach to a scientific 

 form. The greater part of the literature of this subject consisted of 

 Herbals, all of which were formed on the same plan, and appeared 

 under titles such as Hortus, or Ortus Sanitatis. There are, for exam- 

 ple, three 84 such German Herbals, with woodcuts, which date about 

 1490. But an important peculiarity in these works is that they con- 

 tain some indigenous species placed side by side with the old ones. In 

 1516, The Grete Herbal was published in England, also with woodcuts. 

 It contains an account of more than four hundred vegetables, and their 



90 Sprengel, i. 230. 21 Ib. i. 239. * Ib. i. 241. 3 Ib. ib. 



44 Augsburg, 1488. Mainz, 1491. Lubec, 1492. 



