PLANT NAMES 



HISTORY OF PLANT NAMING 



The first real attempt to put botanical nomen- 

 clature on a scientific basis was made by Theo- 

 phrastus, a Greek philosopher who lived from 370 

 to 286 B.C. He was the favourite pupil and the 

 successor of the celebrated Aristotle, who bequeathed 

 to him his library and the originals of his works. He 

 presided over the peripatetic school of philosophy 

 in Athens for thirty-five years, and left to it his 

 garden, with house and colonnades, as a permanent 

 seat of instruction. He was a man of wide and 

 varied intellectual interests, and wrote books 

 on biological, metaphysical, astronomical, ethical, 

 political, and rhetorical subjects. But most of 

 these have been lost, and by far the most important 

 that have come down to us are two large botanical 

 treatises, " On the Study of Plants," and " On the 

 Causes of Plants." The first of these contained ten 

 books, of which nine have survived. We should not 

 expect a pioneer like Theophrastus to produce a 

 work of scientific accuracy, but, imperfect as it 

 necessarily was, it commands our admiration, and 

 it was a help and stimulus to his successors in the 

 same field. He describes about five hundred species 

 of plants, but his chief interest in them lay in their 

 medicinal properties. 



In the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero — that is, 

 in the first century of our era— another Greek, an 



