INTRODUCTION 



it is bequeathed to certain specified friends and to 

 those who will spend their time with them in learn- 

 ing and philosophy ; the testator is to be buried 

 in it without extravagant expense, a custodian is 

 apjx)inted, and provision is made for the emancipa- 

 tion of various gardeners, so soon as they have 

 earned their freedom by long enough service. 



According to Diogenes Theophrastus died at the 

 age of eighty-five. He is made indeed to say in the 

 probably spurious Preface to the ' Characters ' that he 

 is writing in his ninety-ninth year; while St. Jerome's 

 Chronicle asserts that he lived to the age of 107. 

 Accepting Diogenes' date, we may take it that he 

 died about 285 b.c. ; it is said that he complained 

 that *' we die just when we are beginning to live." 

 His life must indeed have been a remarkably full 

 and interesting one, when we consider that he 

 enjoyed the personal friendship of two such men as 

 Plato and Aristotle, and that he had witnessed the 

 whole of the careers of Philip and Alexander of 

 Macedon. To Alexander indeed he was directly 

 indebted ; the great conqueror had not been for 

 nothing the pupil of the encyclopaedic Aristotle. 

 He took with him to the East scientifically trained 

 observers, the results of whose obser^^ations were at 

 Tlieophrastus' disposal. Hence it is that his de- 

 s^criptions of plants are not limited to the flora of 

 (jreece and the Levant ; to the reports of Alexander's 

 followers he owed his accounts of such plants as the 

 ( otton-plant, banyan, pepper, cinnamon, myrrh and 



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