The Evolution of Botany. 175 



according to this logic ; and it was so. The first works writ- 

 ten on botany were only descriptive. 



Thus the very earliest attention given to the study, if it 

 may be so called, of plants, was bestowed upon those having 

 or supposed to have medicinal value, and botany was there- 

 fore begun simultaneously with medicine. Although the 

 progress in the beginning of medicine was very slow, the 

 number of remedies, mostly though not wholly consisting 

 of plants, gradually became larger. When medicine as a 

 science began to assume form and to be taught in the schools 

 of Greece, Hippocrates, the father of medicine, published 

 the names of all medicinal plants known in his time, of 

 which there were but 300. The various departments of bot- 

 any were by no means instituted together or at one time ; 

 from antiquity until comparatively recent times the little at- 

 tention given to botany was mainly devoted to a meager 

 description, especially of medicinal plants. So Hippocrates's 

 work gave only the description and supposed medicinal 

 properties of the 300 plants known to him. 



Aristotle, 350 B. c., seems to have been the first one who 

 occupied himself with the study of plants, but, unfortu- 

 nately, the results of his studies have been lost with other 

 works of his. Those of his pupil Theophrastus have been 

 preserved and are probably based upon his. 



Theophrastus, besides indulging, in a purely philosophical 

 sense, in a speculation upon the nature and origin of plants, 

 describes about 500 species, the names of the most of which 

 are not familiar to the botanist of to-day. Perhaps some 

 botanist of the future will recognize in the plants described 

 in these old books the ancestors of some of our present plants, 

 and determine what changes evolution has wrought upon 

 the former in twenty-two centuries. The works referred to 

 above were published again, and in German, in the begin- 

 ning of this century. 



From Theophrastus's time there is no record of any work 

 done in botany until the first century of the Christian era, 

 when Dioscorides wrote his Materia Medica at Rome, in 

 which he describes 600 medicinal plants. Though the num- 

 ber had swelled to 600, there was no advance in any other 

 direction since Aristotle's time. 



The beginning and spreading of the Christian religion 

 checked the progress of the sciences exceedingly, and botany, 

 in which considerable interest had been awakened through 

 Dioscorides's works, with many of the other sciences, was 



