XIV INTRODUCTION. 
striking beauty and sublimity, to descend to a calm and 
patient vestigation of the causes of the effects which they 
observed.” 
It is, then, to Brunfels, a physician of Berne, in 
Switzerland, that we are indebted for the revival of 
botanical science, when the light of learning again shone 
forth upon the world after the period of the dark ages; 
he lived about the beginning of the sixteenth century, and 
was the first person who represented the figures of plants 
by means of woodcuts. About the same time lived 
Gesner, and soon after the celebrated naturalist Cesalpi- 
nus, one of the professors of the University of Padua. He 
was born at Arezzo, in Tuscany, in 1519; his investi- 
gations threw great light upon vegetable structures, he 
was the first botanist who endeavoured to classify plants, 
and demonstrate their different sexes, although this latter 
fact had been hinted at by the ancients. He was 
followed by Jungius, who died in 1657 ; and then came 
Morison, and after him the celebrated John Ray, born in 
1628, at Black Notley, in Essex, his father being the 
blacksmith of the village. His works show the most 
laborious research, and in his “Historia Plantarum 
generalis” is given all that was known of botanical learn- 
ing at that time. Haller designated him as the greatest 
botanist in the memory of man. ‘T'o him succeeded Grew 
in this country, and Malpighi on the Continent, whose 
splendid investigations and examinations of the structure 
of plants are almost unequalled. Then came Camera- 
rius, to whom the honour is due of first discovering and 
proving by experiments the existence of the sexes of 
plants. He was followed by Tournefort, the celebrated 
