Chap, i.] from Brutifels to Kaspar Bauliin. 17 



selves with all possible exactness. History shows that in this 

 way a new science arose in the course of a few years, while the 

 philosophical botany of Aristotle and Theophrastus has led to 

 no important result. Moreover we shall see how even in the 

 hands of a philosophically gifted and scholarly man like 

 Cesalpino the teaching of Aristotle had only a mischievous 

 effect on the study of plants. 



If the compilers of herbals did not aim at deducing general 

 conclusions from their observations, yet the continually accu- 

 mulating descriptions of individual forms gradually gave rise 

 of themselves to perceptions of an abstract and more compre- 

 hensive character. The feeling for resemblance and difference 

 of form especially was developed, and finally the idea of natural 

 relationship ; and though this idea was as yet by no means worked 

 out with scientific precision, it was nevertheless, even in the in- 

 distinct form in which it appears in de l'Obel in 1576 and more 

 clearly in Kaspar Bauhin in 1623, a result of the highest value, 

 and one of which neither learned antiquity nor the middle ages 

 had ever caught a glimpse. The perception of a natural affinity 

 among plants could only be obtained from exact description 

 a thousand times repeated, never from the abstractions of the 

 Aristotelian school, which rested essentially on superficial 

 observation. It appears then that the scientific value of the 

 herbals of the 16th century lay mostly in the description of such 

 plants as every botanist found in a somewhat limited portion 

 of his native land, and considered worth his notice ; at the 

 same time the later compilers endeavoured to give a universal 

 character to each herbal by admitting plants which had not 

 been actually seen by the writer; each as far as possible 

 gathered from his predecessors all that they had seen, and 

 added what he had himself seen that was new ; but in contrast 

 with the previous centuries the peculiar merit of each new- 

 herbal was held to depend not on what the compiler had 

 borrowed from his predecessors, but on what he had added 

 from his own observation. Hence every one was anxious to 



c 



