LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 175 



however, it comes to that apparently quite as ancient division of 

 the vegetal kingdom into things cultivated and things wild, he de- 

 liberately ignores it. His first three plates represent three most 

 common and homely wayside weeds, members of the genus Plantago; 

 and thenceforward throughout his volumes he deals much more 

 extensively with wild plants than with the domesticated. 



Now this eliminating of the distinction referred to is not to be at- 

 tributed to any following of the suggestions of Hippon, who some two 

 thousand years before had declared plants wild and domesticated 

 to be all of one lineage. There is no intimation that Brunfels had 

 made tests, and proven out of the book of nature that this old-time 

 grouping must be abandoned. The thought had come to him 

 solely as a deduction from theological premises. The polytheistic 

 ancients had held that the different alliances of cultivated plants 

 and trees were each the creation of some beneficent particular 

 divinity; and that the less useful or the altogether useless had 

 hardly been created at all. The theology which Brunfels accepted, 

 and, as a profession, taught, was monotheistic. One Divinity had 

 made all the plants that are — the wayside weeds, the homely remedial 

 herbs, as well as the beautiful things of the field, the garden, and 

 the orchard. Such doctrine of the equality of all plants as to one 

 divine origin finds expression in the last one of Brunfels' several 

 prefaces, which contains a prayer, after which one reads his apology 

 for giving to those common, lowly, and weedy things, the plantains, 

 the foremost place in his system of botany. " They are the very 

 commonest of plants," he says, " and are known to everybody; and 

 being both lowly and also singularly useful, they are most apt to 

 recall to mind the thought of God, whose way it is to work wonders 

 through means that are usually accounted insignificant, passing by 

 such as make more display, and which men therefore hold in more 

 esteem." ^ This is even showing a preference for wild growths be- 

 fore those that have undergone domestication ; a kind of preference 

 that has been felt by the great majority of philosophic botanists 

 from Brunfels' time to ours; and by virtue of his being the first 

 propagandist of this new idea he sets up another landmark in the 

 history of botany. 



This idea of the equal genetic dignity of all plants seems to have 

 come to Brunfels as a deduction from a theologic principle, rather 

 than inductively from the study of nature ; but whence he derived 

 it signifies nothing to the disparagement of the idea itself; especially 

 now, after all the world has come to concede its truthfulness. But 



> Herbarum Vivcn Icones, vol. i, p. 22. 



