302 HISTORY OF BOTANY. 



simple and compound medicines, we still have traces 

 in our language : 



He would ope his leathern scrip, 

 And show me simples of a thousand names, 

 Telling their strange and vigorous faculties. 



MILTON, Comus. 







Where the subject of our history is so entirely at 

 a stand, it is unprofitable to dwell on a list of names. 

 The Arabians, small as their science was, were able 

 to instruct the Christians. Their writings were trans- 

 lated by learned Europeans, for instance, Michael 

 Scot, and Constantine of Africa, a Carthiginian who 

 had lived forty years among the Saracens 20 , and who 

 died A.D. 1087. Among his works, is a Treatise, 

 De Gradibus, which contains the Arabian medicinal 

 lore. In the thirteenth century occur Encyclopae- 

 dias, as that of Albertus Magnus, and of Vincent of 

 Beauvais ; but these contain no natural history 

 except traditions and fables. Even the ancient 

 writers were altogether perverted and disfigured. 

 The Dioscorides of the middle ages varied mate- 

 rially from ours 21 . Monks, merchants, and adven- 

 turers travelled far, but knowledge was little in- 

 creased. Simon of Genoa 23 , a writer on plants in the 

 fourteenth century, boasts that he perambulated the 

 East in order to collect plants. " Yet in his Clams 

 Sanationis" says a modern botanical writer 23 , "we 

 discover no trace of an acquaintance with nature. 

 He merely compares the Greek, Arabic, and Latin 



20 Sprengel, i. 230. 21 Ib. i. 239. 22 Ib. i. 241. 23 Ib. ib. 



