INTRODUCTION. 



THE authors of the oldest herbals of the i6th century, 

 Brunfels, Fuchs, Bock, Mattioli and others, regarded plants 

 mainly as the vehicles of medicinal virtues ; to them plants 

 were the ingredients in compound medicines, and were there- 

 fore by preference termed ' simplicia,' simple constituents of 

 medicaments. Their chief object was to discover the plants 

 employed by the physicians of antiquity, the knowledge of 

 which had been lost in later times. The corrupt texts of 

 Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen had been in many 

 respects improved and illustrated by the critical labours of the 

 Italian commentators of the i5th and of the early part of the 

 1 6th century; but there was one imperfection which no 

 criticism could remove, the highly unsatisfactory descriptions 

 of the old authors or the entire absence of descriptions. It 

 was moreover at first assumed that the plants described by 

 the Greek physicians must grow wild in Germany also, and 

 generally in the rest of Europe ; each author identified a 

 different native plant with some one mentioned by Dioscorides 

 or Theophrastus or others, and thus there arose as early as the 

 1 6th century a confusion of nomenclature which it was scarcely 

 possible to clear away. As compared with the efforts of the 

 philological commentators, who knew little of plants from their 

 own observation, a great advance was made by the first German 

 composers of herbals, who went straight to nature, described 

 the wild plants growing around them and had figures of them 

 carefully executed in wood. Thus was made the first begin- 

 ning of a really scientific examination of plants, though the 

 aims pursued were not yet truly scientific, for no questions 



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