360 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



HERBARIA IN THEIR RELATION TO BOTANY.* 



By JOHN P. LOTSY, Pu. D. 



THE offer of Captain Donnell Smith to Johns Hopkins Uni- 

 versity of his valuable herbarium and library gives us an 

 excellent opportunity to consider what such herbaria are, how 

 they are brought together, and what is their purpose. We intend, 

 furthermore, to show what they accomplish in botany and what 

 botany does besides. 



The importance of Captain Smith's gift will then be evident, 

 and the value of a well-equipped botanical department to the 

 Johns Hopkins and to the community at large will also be clear. 

 The references to flowers and trees in ancient poems show that 

 the beauty of vegetable Nature was fully appreciated at an early 

 period, and agriculture requires the rudiments of a scientific 

 knowledge of plants ; but the first systematic attempts to study 

 botany scientifically owe their origin to the desire to know more 

 of plants in their relation to medicine. There are few plants 

 which have not at some time been supposed to have great medici- 

 nal value, as the number of those designated officinalis clearly 

 indicates. 



The first systematic study of plants in their relation to medi- 

 cine was in the Athenian Republic, and Theophrastus, Dioscorides, 

 Pliny, and Galen are especially known for their writings on this 

 subject. During the middle ages the science of the Greeks was 

 forgotten, and interest in their investigations was not revived 

 till the sixteenth century. By this time the old Greek texts had 

 become greatly obscured by imperfect translations, and it required 

 much patience and care to recognize plants from their descrip- 

 tions. The botanists of the sixteenth century, like Bock, Fuchs, 

 and Mattioli, working in Germany, found another difficulty in the 

 circumstance that plants of their country differed widely from 

 those in Greece. This, together with the imperfect state of the 

 old descriptions, gave rise to frequent mistakes in identification. 

 Some other authors, however, would notice the error, and disputes 

 often arose, which sometimes became violent. The great value of 

 this work to us is that it showed the necessity for more exact 

 descriptions of plants, and this, combined with the occasional 

 finding of new plants of a supposed or real value to medicine, 

 gave rise to those large parchment-bound, queer-looking old vol- 

 umes on botany which, besides the descriptions, often contained 

 very beautiful pictures of the plants. These were then called 



* Read before the Scientific Association of the Johns Hopkins University, February 21, 

 1894. 



