SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 191 



eidos or species, and gems, the family, in which are included all combinations 

 of forms which come above the notion of species. Nor indeed has he given us 

 any really worked-out system; the animal system which is counted for his 

 has been compiled by others from his writings. His knowledge of forms was 

 also so slight that there seems to have been no difficulty in following the 

 simple grouping which he employed. As a matter of fact, during the centuries 

 that followed there was no need for a more detailed classification; the ani- 

 mals and plants which became known in late antiquity and the Middle Ages 

 were not so numerous that they could not be covered by the Aristotelean 

 natural philosophy. It was not until the great geographical discoveries of 

 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries introduced the knowledge of a great 

 number of new life-forms that it was an inevitable necessity to widen the 

 biological classification if the material collected was not to accumulate 

 into an absolutely intractable mass. 



The classification of plants especially demanded revision and expansion. 

 Actually it was long after zoology had done so that botany attained the 

 rank of an independent science. In antiquity and the Middle Ages botanical 

 knowledge was essentially supplementary to pharmacology. Aristotle's 

 botanical writings are, except for a few fragments, entirely lost. His disciple 

 Theophrastus' great work on plants was adopted by later writers as a model; 

 in it he thoroughly discusses the difference between plants and animals, 

 higher plants and higher animals being exclusively compared and the com- 

 parison developing into abstract and fruitless speculations. The old primitive 

 division into herbs, bushes, and trees is the only one to be found here. Be- 

 sides Theophrastus' work there was during classical antiquity a purely 

 pharmacological account of plants which was very celebrated and which 

 was ascribed to a philosopher named Dioscorides, whose character and period 

 are unknown (he probably lived at the beginning of the Christian era); it 

 was on Theophrastus and him that Pliny based the account of plants which 

 is included in his great Natural History. In the Middle Ages these writings, 

 which were believed to contain all the plants in existence, were closely stud- 

 ied and commented upon; attempts to find the plants from central Europe 

 in these works, which applied only to the Mediterranean countries, led to 

 the most absurd speculations. Only some few Arabian authors ventured 

 through all this long period to describe new plants. It was not until the 

 Renaissance that a change took place in this respect. One pioneer in this 

 field was Otto Brunfels, born, probably in 1488, in south Germany. In his 

 youth he was a monk; then he became a Lutheran and a schoolmaster at 

 Mainz; he died at Berne in 1534. He published an important work entitled 

 Herbarum viva eicones, which inspired Linnasus to call him the father of bot- 

 any. In this work, which was illustrated with excellent woodcuts, Brunfels 

 describes all the plants he knows. In his botanical descriptions he still partly 



