CHAPTER III 

 GREEKS AND ROMx\NS AFTER THEOPHRASTUS 



Leaving Theophrastus, and going forth in search of the next 

 landmark in the. progress of our science, we seem at once to enter 

 an almost boundless pathless waste. Or, as the outlook has been 

 described by another: "If history be a connected succession 

 of events, botany from Theophrastus forward to the sixteenth cen- 

 tury has no history. Only isolated pieces of information, like 

 bits of wreck half buried up and down stretches of seaside sand 

 are left. These are connected with certain names; but, beyond 

 that, are hardly of historic import. Of written monuments of real 

 botany in the Greek language after Theophrastus there remains 

 not one. For the small volume of Nicolaus Damascenus, known 

 to us only by a translation into barbarous Latin, perhaps might, 

 and possibly might not, have been reckoned such a monument."^ 



What is here understood is, that a great multitude of scattered 

 fragments, together with several completed pieces of writing about 

 plants that, out of the literature of antiquity, have been preserved 

 do not afford material for the history of botany for so much as one 

 only of the ten centuries that next succeeded the times of Aristotle 

 and Theophrastus; and that this is true partly for the reason that 

 the pieces and the fragments that have reached us are from men 

 who were not botanists after the order of Theophrastus, but 

 writers on medical, agricultural, and horticultural botany. 



That the whole number of Greeks who wrote of plants in one way 

 or another was very great there is evidence enough. As many 

 as three hundred and fifty years ago the learned botanist, zoologist, 

 and bibliographer, Conrad Gesner, gave out a printed list of more 

 than one hundred names of Greeks who, in his day, were known 

 to have written more or less botany.- Of ancient Latin authors of 

 botanical works similar to those of the Greeks in kind, the same 



» Meyer, Geschichte der Botanik, i, 202. 



2 This in one of the several valuable papers that are prefatory to Hierony- 

 mus Tragus' De Stirpium Historia, 1552. 



143 



