Aristotle's biology 



Aristotle's work on Plants is not extant. To 

 judge from the passages touching this subject, 

 which are scattered through his other works,^^ 

 his botanical observations were less penetrat- 

 ing than his zoological. Yet it is not well to 

 judge him from these fragments, when his 

 main work is lost. We pass at once to the 

 writings of his but slightly younger disciple, 

 Theophrastus. 



The latter's Enquiry Into Plants " is the 

 great classical botany, and is more clearly 

 written and better put together than his De 

 Causis Plantarum.^* No more than Aristotle 

 himself, is Theophrastus to be taken as the first 

 botanist. Much thought had already been de- 

 voted to plant life and to the medical properties 

 of plants, for instance, by the Hippocratic 

 school. His work is far from primitive, yet 

 the author still wanders in a maze, since he 

 has not reached a satisfactory or, so to speak, 

 " natural " system of classification. Here 

 Greek botany remained behind Greek zoology, 

 and one may say at once that the Enquiry Into 

 Plants has by no means the philosophical 

 interest of Aristotle's works on zoology, nor 

 is it as suggestive or useful for the modern stu- 

 dent. Indeed, the view of at least one able 



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