2 THE STUDY OF PLANTS IN ANCIENT AND MODERN TIMES. 
useful plants were to be recognized and distinguished from the rest. And the 
attitude of the great mass of country folk in times past was the same as at the 
present day. All along anxiety for a livelihood, the need of the individual to 
satisfy his own hunger, the interests of the family, the provision of food for 
domestic animals, have been the factors that have first led men to classify plants 
into the nutritious and the poisonous, into those that are pleasant to the taste and 
those that are unpleasant, and have induced them to make attempts at cultivation, 
and to observe the various phenomena of plant-life. 
No less powerful as an incentive to the study of herbs, roots, and seeds, and to 
the minute comparison of similar forms and the determination of their differences, 
was the hope and belief that the higher powers had endowed particular plants with 
healing properties. In ancient Greece there was a special guild, the “ Rhizotomoi,” 
whose members collected and prepared such roots and herbs as were considered 
to be curative, and either sold them themselves or caused them to be sold by 
apothecaries. Through the labours of these Rhizotomoi, added to those of Greek, 
Roman, and Arabic physicians, and of gardeners, vine-growers, and farmers, a mass 
of information concerning the plant-world was acquired, which for a long period 
stood as botanical science. As late as the sixteenth century plants were looked 
upon from a purely utilitarian point of view, not only by the masses but also 
by very many professed scholars; and in most of the books of that time we find 
the medicinal properties, and the general utility of the plants selected for deserip- 
tion and discrimination, occupying a conspicuous position and treated in an 
exhaustive manner. Just as men lived in the firm belief that human destinies 
depended upon the stars, so they clung to the notion that everything upon the 
earth was created for the sake of mankind; and, in particular, that in every plant 
there were forces lying dormant which, if liberated, would conduce either to the 
welfare or to the injury of man. Points which might serve as bases for the 
discovery of these secrets of nature were eagerly sought for. People imagined they 
discerned magic in many plants, and even believed that they were able to trace 
in the resemblance of certain leaves, flowers, and fruits to parts of the human body, 
an indication, emanating from supernatural powers, of the manner in which the 
organ in question was intended to affect the human constitution. The similarity 
in shape between a particular foliage-leaf and the liver did duty for a sign that 
the leaf was capable of successful application in cases of hepatic disease, and the 
fact of a blossom being heart-shaped must mean that it would cure cardiac com- 
plaints. Thus arose the so-called doctrine of Signatures, which, brought to its 
highest development by the Swiss alchemist Bombastus Paracelsus (1493-1541), 
played a great part in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and still survives 
at the present day in the mania for nostrums. The inclination of the masses is 
now, as it was centuries ago, in favour of supernatural and mysterious rather 
than simple and natural interpretations; and a Bombastus Paracelsus would still 
find no lack of credulous followers. In truth, the great bulk of mankind regard 
Botany as subservient to medicine and agriculture, they look at it from the purely 
