198 PITTONIA, 



of the seven lumdred plants in the Materia Medica of Dios- 

 corides, about four hundred had been properly identified.' 

 But the means of ascertaining them had not then been 

 exhausted : the ancient plant-descriptions and the numerous 

 cominentaries on them, and also the then not well explored 

 living fields of classic Grecian and Latin botany, all have 

 been made the subjects of renewed and fruitful investigation 

 even within the present century. My friend errs in assum- 

 ing—and he must have assumed it altogether, and without 

 having looked at the authors named— that the ancients did 

 not describe things or attempt to do so, but that "they merely 

 recorded what certain plants were called in their time." 

 Mere records of plant-names could never have earned for the 

 writers of them the title of "Fathers of Botany,^' as Theo- 

 phrastus, Dioscorides and Pliny have always been called.' 

 Nor is it very accurate to say that " Some of these terms must 

 be as old as spoken language," nor very pertinent to the 

 subject to conclude that "probably a number of them exist 

 on the monviments of ancient Egypt." Egyptian monuments, 

 with their possible names and even figures of plants— all 

 anonymous as to authorship, if any kind of authorship or 

 publication can be ascribed to them— are far from susceptible 

 of being brought into parallel with books of certified author- 

 ship containing names and descriptions, and which have been 

 copied and circulated for the instruction of men for some two 

 thousand years. And as to the antiquity of the names them- 

 selves, few if any are likely to be older than the Latin and 

 Greek languages in whose vocabularies tliey are found ; and 

 neither of these tongues is the earliest, or any where near 

 the earliest, spoken language. 



^^ Against the statement that the Greek fathers of botany 

 "surely did not originate such names as Asiragalns and 

 Sorhusr I can not successfully contend. I am inexcusable 

 for having written Theophrastus as author of Sovhns. It 



1- Pulteney, Hist. Sk. Bot. i. 39. 

 *• Ibid. 3i, 35. 



