J 72 DIVI BOTANICI. 



fill employment of the vegetable energies, as the means of healing 

 injuries and diseases, in the days when Knowledge and Experience 

 were but entering on their interminable career. With notes on the 

 most remarkable of these illustrious personages, and on the salutary 

 virtues of the herbs which are their emblems, an Introduction may 

 be framed for the Sketches of Botanists whose names are comme- 

 morated in the appellations of Plants. 



Artemisia. — This celebrated female was the daughter of Heca- 

 tomnus, king of Caria, a country of Asia Minor, whose inhabitants, 

 from their wealth and fortitude, were long distinguished as a very 

 powerful nation, the metropolis of which was Halicarnassus, the 

 birth-place of several philosophers renowned in the history of patri- 

 otic wisdom. Having conceived an ardent and sincere affection for 

 her brother Mausolus, who was famous for his personal beauty, the 

 princess afterwards became his wife, in conformity with the custom 

 which sanctioned the union of brothers and sisters in marriage — a 

 custom that necessarily obtained among the primitive occupiers of 

 the earth, and thus was a chief cause from which the distinct Races 

 of Men derived their origin. 



Mausolus succeeded to his father's throne, and the prosperity of 

 an industrious people made his reign fortunate, while his own hap- 

 piness was enhanced by the purity of his queen's devoted attachment. 

 But, like most other earth-born pleasures, this scene of comfort, 

 though fair, was transitory. It closed with his death, which took 

 place in the three hundred and fifty-third year before that wonder- 

 ful event from which the Christian epoch dates its commencement. 

 By this overwhelming bereavement, his widow was rendered for- 

 lorn and inconsolable ; and, when his body had been consumed on 

 a funeral pyre, she drank of his ashes suspended in a fluid potion. 

 Resolving to erect an everlasting memorial to the name of her fond- 

 ly bewailed husband, she engaged the emulation of learned men in 

 promoting this aim of her conjugal piety, by the announcement of 

 high and honourable rewards for the best elegiac eulogy on his cha- 

 racter and attainments. In this strife of panegyric, the successful 

 competitor was Theoponipus of Chios : he acquired the reputation 

 of an exact and eloquent historian ; but, with the exception of some 

 detached fragments, his compositions, including the pathetic funeral 

 oration, have all perished from the records of literature. At the 

 same time, and with the desire of preserving for ever from oblivion 

 the object of Artemisia's affection, as well as the intensity of her 

 own enduring sorrow for his dissolution, the widowed mourner con- 

 structed one of the grandest and noblest monuments of antiquity ; 



