LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE I 59 



Whatever nature may or may not be to man, it is impossible to es- 

 tablish any natural order and sequence of things on those utilitarian 

 principles; and he who looks into Pliny's botanical volumes for any- 

 thing like what we understand by taxonomy will be disappointed. 

 Here is what a distinguished botanical systematist of the eighteenth 

 century said of the Roman's plant classifying: "Pliny, the inde- 

 fatigable compiler, published in fifteen books all that Theophrastus, 

 Dioscorides, and their predecessors had said about plants. But 

 he treats this matter in a manner so strictly historical, although 

 in such flowery language, that one may well say of the whole that 

 it is in beautiful disorder." ^ True it is that Pliny begins his history 

 of plants with the discussion of trees. The philosophic Theo- 

 phrastus had done so; but it was for the reason that trees seemed 

 to him to claim the first place as being the most highly organized 

 type of plants. Pliny begins with trees because he judges 

 them to be, on the whole, more useful to man than herbaceous 

 plants. Similarly everywhere in his writings the thread of the 

 economic rather than the philosophic is that by which one is to 

 trace whatever of system there is in his treatment of plants and 

 plant lore. 



It has been claimed by some, and disputed by others, that 

 Pliny was more than a compiler, and that some of the facts which 

 he records were from his own observation. A renewed and thorough 

 study of all his botanical books, with such a question foremost, is 

 still called for; but rather unusual accomplishments are also 

 demanded on the part of the investigator; those of the ripe classical 

 scholar and of the master botanist combined. Adanson, who if I 

 mistake not had for his thesis inaugural a study of Pliny, accredits 

 him as discoverer of the distinction between growth buds and 

 fruit buds in trees, and says that he named the former kind germen, 

 the latter gemma. ^ It was a botanical discovery of high rank, 

 whoever first announced it ; but I should suspect it of having been 

 made anterior to Pliny. 



As if to crown Caius Plinius Secundus with a wreath of myrtle, 

 Plumier (1703) dedicated to him a genus Plinia belonging to the 

 family of the myrtles. 



Claudius Galenus (a.d. 130-201). — In respect to natural 

 endowments, wealth of information acquired by study at home 

 and travels abroad, and fertility of able and learned authorship, 

 Galen was one of the great celebrities of antiquity; as a physician 



> Michel Adanson, Families des Plantes, Preface, p. vii. 



> Adanson, Histoire de la Botanique, p. 94. 



