8 PLANT NAMES 



army doctor named Dioscorides, wrote a book on 

 Materia Medica, in which he describes the virtues 

 of many plants and calls them by their current 

 names. 



About the same time, or a little later, the same 

 subject was treated by the elder Pliny, who was 

 Admiral of the Roman fleet, and perished in the 

 great eruption of Vesuvius, a.d. 79, that destroyed 

 Pompeii. Like Theophrastus, he was a man of 

 great intellectual activity, and interested in many 

 subjects. He was not only a sailor, but a soldier, 

 a lawyer, and a philosopher, an insatiable reader 

 and a voluminous writer. He tells us that much of 

 his literary work was done in hours stolen from 

 sleep. Among other treatises, he wrote fifty books 

 of history, and he left a hundred and fifty notebooks 

 of extracts written, as his nephew, the younger 

 Pliny, tells us, in a very small script on both sides 

 of the page. All are lost with the exception of his 

 " Naturalis Historia," in thirty-seven books, which 

 is preserved in nearly a complete state. Of this 

 huge work, sixteen books treat of trees and plants, 

 two of which are concerned with their medicinal 

 properties. And as in them he enumerates about 

 five hundred species by name, they are valuable 

 from our present point of view. The information 

 they give is not, however, so useful as one might 

 suppose, because it is often doubtful whether we 

 can with any certainty identify the plants to 

 which he refers. There is no source of error and of 

 quarreUing so frequent and mischievous as the use 



