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 descrip- 

 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 



