298 HISTORY OF BOTANY. 



by the best judges 13 to offer no evidence that the 

 author observed for himself. Yet he says expressly 

 in his Preface, that his love of natural history, and 

 his military life, have led him into many countries, 

 in which he has had opportunity to become ac- 

 quainted with the nature ,of herbs and trees 14 . He 

 speaks of six hundred plants, but often indicates 

 only their names and properties, giving no descrip- 

 tion by which they can be identified. The main 

 cause of his great reputation in subsequent times 

 was, that he says much of the medicinal virtues of 

 .vegetables. 



We come now to the ages of darkness and 

 lethargy, when the habit of original thought seems 

 to die away, as the talent of original observation had 

 done before. Commentators and mystics succeed to 

 the philosophical naturalists of better times. And 

 though a new race, altogether distinct in blood and 

 character from the Greek, appropriates to itself the 

 stores of Grecian learning, this movement does not, 

 as might be expected, break the chains of literary 

 slavery. The Arabs bring to the cultivation of the 

 science of the Greeks, their own oriental habit of 

 submission, their oriental love of wonder ; and thus, 

 while they swell the herd of commentators and 

 mystics, they produce no philosopher. 



Yet the Arabs discharged an important function 



in the history of human knowledge 15 , by preserving, 



and transmitting to more enlightened times, the 



13 Mirbel, 510. " Sprengel, i. 136. I5 Ib. i. 203. ' 



