l62 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



A man of as profound erudition, and of such high attainments 

 in'botany as the celebrated Albert Haller. conceding the supremacy 

 of Galen as a man of genius, and a great master of everything 

 relating to the healing art, seems to deny that he was anything 

 of a botanist, affirming that almost all his botany is borrowed 

 from his predecessors , and chiefly from Dioscorides . ^ This criticism , 

 in as far as it is adverse, touches the writings of the man as a possible 

 contributor to botanical knowledge. It does not — or if it does it 

 ought not to — stand as an impeachment of his knowledge of plants. 

 It is incautious to pass judgment against any man's attainments 

 in a subject until he has at least in some way expressed himself 

 on that subject. To know many plants familiarly and well 

 is to be something very like a botanist, whether one ever write a 

 paragraph of botany or not. A familiar knowledge of many 

 plants Galen not only urged upon the whole medical profession; 

 he claimed that he himself possessed such knowledge. " In as 

 far as possible the physician ought to know all plants, and if 

 not all, the greater proportion, and those most useful. . . . He 

 who knows the different kinds in all their states from young and 

 small to fully grown, and can so distinguish between them, will in 

 many places find certain useful plants, as I have done in various 

 parts of Italy, where he who knows them only in the dead and dry, 

 would never recognize them whether in the young state or the 

 mature. There is no quacksalver who does not readily identify the 

 herbs that are imported from Crete by their fruits; but that some 

 of these selfsame things might be gathered on the outskirts of Rome 

 they do not know, because the season of their herborizings does not 

 correspond to that of the maturity of these plants. But that time 

 is well known to me, and I go in quest of Chamaepitys, Chamaedrys, 

 Centaurium, Hypericum, Polium, and others of that kind, at just 

 the right time, and gather them in their perfect maturity, neither 

 waiting until they are past that, and are sunburnt, nor going 

 too early, that is, before the fruit is well formed." It has well been 

 observed by one of the historians of botany, that "The man who 

 wrote thus must have been either a consummate charlatan, or else 

 a man of deep and thorough knowledge, and a charlatan Galen 

 was not." 2 



When one reads in Galen over and again such commendations 

 of an intimate knowledge of many living plants, and when it is 

 remembered that he made long journeys by sea and land in the 



' Haller, Bibliotheca Botanica, vol. i, p. iii. 

 2 Meyer, Geschichte der Botanik, vol. ii, p. 191. 



