LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE I 45 



mushrooms, besides many things relating to various other food 

 plants.^ 



The only works of Nicander that have reached our time are two 

 poems, under the somewhat lugubrious titles Alexipharmica, a 

 treatise on poisons in general and their antidotes, and Theriaca, 

 on poisonous animals. The first of these, according to Meyer,^ 

 who appears to have read both of them carefully, is of 630 verses, 

 and has under discussion 21 different poisons, of which 2 are mineral, 

 8 animal, and 11 vegetable products; and the remedies for them are 

 with hardly an exception vegetable. The account of the symptoms 

 of different poisonings is said to be both true to modern experience 

 and vividly drawn, but the plants themselves, whether poisonous 

 or antidotal, are hardly more than named, never described, and the 

 book as a whole is devoid of matter properly botanical. 



In the Theriaca, a more extensive work of 958 verses, botany, 

 as well as zoology, fares somewhat better. After a preliminary 

 statement of means of frightening away poisonous animals or 

 keeping them aloof, together with certain precautions to be ob- 

 served by such as sleep out of doors at night, there follow some 

 descriptions of certain more common and dangerous kinds which 

 are often drawn with remarkable exactitude and faithfulness to 

 nature. And here again, the bites and stings of these have always 

 their remedies in certain plants, of which also in most cases only 

 the names are given, though sometimes a few hints are given as to 

 how the plant may be identified. The three particular plants, 

 centaurea, aristolochia, and trifolium, are together efficacious 

 against every poisonous animal's bite or sting. The identity of 

 Nicander' s centaurion is uncertain. It may have been Hypericum 

 olympicum, but that of Theophrastus, whom Nicander often quotes, 

 is Ferula opopanax more probably. The aristolochia is that of 

 modern botany, the species either A. rotunda or A. longa or both. 

 The only trifolium known to the Greeks was our Psoralea bitumi- 

 nosa. In the two poems thus adverted to Meyer counted the names 

 of 1 2 5 different plants. ^ 



Sprengel gives a list of some thirty species of Nicandrian plants 

 which, though not in all cases identifiable with certainty, seem 

 to have been first mentioned by this writer. * 



Adanson in 1763, resolving to dedicate a genus of plants to 



> Haller, Bibliotheca Botanica, vol. i, p. 54, 



* Meyer, Geschichte der Botanik, vol. i, p. 247. 

 » Ibid., 248. 



* Sprengel, Hist., vol. i, p. 129. 



