LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE I 53 



form of commentaries on Dioscorides. Such in large part are the 

 works of Anguillara, Matthioius, Maranta, Dodonaeus, Cesalpinus, 

 Fabius Columna, and the Bauhins. In several of these the annota- 

 tions and comments quite exceed in bulk the Dioscoridean text, and 

 are replete with new botany; that is, they contain the names and 

 descriptions of many plants which the commentators are con- 

 vinced Dioscorides did not know, and which they therefore judge 

 to be new. One may fairly say that the greater part of all the new 

 botanical matter published during the whole of the sixteenth 

 century, and a part of the seventeenth, came out in the form of 

 annotations upon the text of Dioscorides. Thus it appears that 

 the Greek, who only meant to provide medical students with a full 

 compend of remedies, and of the marks by which to know them, 

 became incidentally the first master of phytography ; the one every 

 line of whose plant descriptions has been more attentively studied 

 word by word, and that by a greater number of erudite men than 

 any other book about plants that has yet been written ; unless one 

 should possibly be obliged to make an exception of Bauhin's Pinax. 

 But even that is, first of all, a compend of Theophrastan and Diosco- 

 ridean phytography, together with such augmentations and im- 

 provements as in the year 1623 were found necessary. 



Latin editions of Dioscorides are too numerous to be given a 

 reckoning ; and almost the same may be said as to early translations 

 of him into modern tongues; for between the years 1555 and 1752 

 there were at least twelve Spanish editions, as great a number in 

 Italian, and there were editions in French in 1553, 1559, and 1580. 

 There was one translation into German as early as 1546, another 

 in 1 610, and this last appears to have been issued again in 1614. ^ 



Little in the way of botanical taxonomy will be looked for in a 

 work on pharmacy that is nearly nineteen centuries old. The 

 most comprehensive of his groups are formed according to properties; 

 thus his Book I is devoted to the consideration of plants that are 

 of merely aromatic rather than medicinal qualities; growths that 

 furnish oily, gummy, or resinous products, such as enter into the 

 composition of salves and ointments; and after these follow the 

 trees that yield fleshy fruits of grateful though not specifically 

 aromatic flavors. Book II, beginning with animals, and animal 

 products that are of dietetic and medicinal use, ends with the 

 cereals, the leguminous, malvaceous, cruciferous, and other garden 

 herbs. Then Books III and IV deal with a vast number of plants 

 more distinctively medicinal. 



» Pritzel, Thesattrus, 2d ed., pp. 86, 87. 



