LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 163 



endeavor to familiarize himself with the medicinal plants of different 

 climes, and when one has marked the keenness of his powers of 

 observation everywhere, it is impossible to agree with the learned 

 Haller that in botany Galen was inexpert ; nor can it reasonably be 

 questioned that had he betaken himself to phytography, he would 

 have laid all botanical posterity under deep obligations to himself. 

 Now, that he did not describe plants, but was accustomed to give their 

 names only, or but little more, one might have been disposed to 

 ■charge to the fact of his having flourished in the very next century 

 after Dioscorides whose 600 species, embracing the whole vegetable 

 materia medica, may have been for the most part well identified 

 at Galen's period, so that the mention of a name only would suffi- 

 ciently recall a species. But such apology for Galen would be super- 

 fluous. The truth seems to be that he had next to no faith in 

 phytography at all. He takes openly the ground that " The identi- 

 fication of plants is better accomplished by the actual observation 

 of them under the help and guidance of a teacher, than by that 

 method which may be likened to the attempting to learn to navigate 

 the seas by studying books on navigation." ^ This, then, is the 

 main reason why Galen almost abjured plant description. 



The passage is luminous with historic information about the 

 study of botany in the Rome of eighteen centuries ago. We know 

 already that at this period the occupation of a well trained physician 

 is lucrative. There are many of them; therefore the candidates 

 for the profession are not few. The remedies in use are almost 

 all botanical, and they all study botany; quite otherwise, by the 

 way, than botany is studied in twentieth-century schools of medi- 

 cine, and less perfunctorily. Unless in their practice of medicine 

 they are to be at the mercy of the unscrupulous among herb gather- 

 ers and drug vendors, they must know the marks of the genuine 

 thing. Therefore important among their regular exercises is that 

 of identifying plants, the book open before them, the specimen it 

 miay be a withered and shrunken root or rootstock, not improbably 

 supplemented by a fresh one newly brought in from its native soil, 

 or from some drug garden. The standard botanical work, descrip- 

 tive and pharmaceutical, is Dioscorides — its author hardly a 

 century dead — and there are others. The descriptions are mostly 

 brief and often inadequate, so that mere guesses at the identity 

 of things frequently pass instead of certainty, and about the 

 identity of some that are of remedial importance the whole fraternity 

 — Galen himself perhaps excepted — is wrong. At all events none 



• Galen, ed. Kuhn, vol. xi, p. 96. 



