8 Early History of Botany [ch. 



of a honey-cake must be made when Iris foetidissima is 

 rooted up, or to believe that if an eagle comes near when 

 Hellebore is being collected, anyone who is engaged in the 

 work is fated to die within the year. 



The herbalists' knowledge of plants must have been in 

 the first place transmitted from generation to generation 

 entirely by word of mouth, but as time went on, written 

 records began to replace the oral tradition. The earliest 

 extant European work dealing with medicinal plants is 

 the famous Materia Medica of Dioscorides, which was 

 accepted as an almost infallible authority as late as the 

 Renaissance period. 



Dioscorides Anazarbeus was a medical man who 

 probably flourished in the first century of the Christian 

 era, in the time of Nero and Vespasian. Tradition has, 

 however, sometimes assigned to him the post of physician 

 to Antony and Cleopatra. His native land was Asia Minor, 

 but he appears to have travelled widely. In his Materia 

 Medica he described about five hundred plants, with some 

 attempt at an orderly scheme, though, naturally, the result 

 is seldom successful when judged by our modern standards 

 of classification. The actual descriptions of the plants are 

 very slight, and it is only those with particularly salient 

 characteristics which can be recognised with any ease. 

 Careful research on the part of later writers has however 

 led to the identification of a number of the plants to which 

 he refers. 



There is a famous manuscript of Dioscorides at Vienna, 

 which is said to have been copied at the expense of Juliana 

 Anicia, the daughter of the Emperor Flavius Anicius, 

 about the end of the fifth, or the beginning of the sixth 

 century. The character of the script settles the age within 

 narrow limits. Juliana lived into the reign of Justinian, 

 and was renowned for her ardent Christian faith, and for 

 the churches which she built. The manuscript which bears 

 her name is illustrated by a number of drawings, which are 

 in some cases remarkably beautiful, and very naturalistic. 

 A facsimile reproduction of this manuscript was published 

 in 1906, and it is thus rendered accessible to students. 

 Examples of the figures are shown on a reduced scale in 

 Plates I, II and XV. 



