i] The Elder Pliny 





The botanists of the Renaissance devoted a great deal 

 of time and energy to the consideration of the writings of 

 Dioscorides. The chief of the many commentators who 

 dealt with the subject were Matthiolus, Ruellius and 

 Amatus Lusitanus, and a discussion of the botany of 

 Dioscorides formed an integral part of almost every six- 

 teenth-century herbal. 



One of the contemporaries of Dioscorides, Gaius Plinius 

 Secundus, commonly called the Elder Pliny, should perhaps 

 be mentioned at this point, although he was not a physician, 

 nor does he deserve the name of a philosopher. In the 

 course of his ' Natural History,' which is an encyclopaedic 

 account of the knowledge of his time, he treats of the 

 vegetable world. He refers to a far larger number of 

 plants than Dioscorides, probably because the latter con- 

 fined himself to those which were of importance from a 

 medicinal point of view, whereas Pliny mentioned indiscrimi- 

 nately any plant to which he found a reference in any 

 previous book. Pliny's work was chiefly of the nature of a 

 compilation, and indeed it would scarcely be reasonable to 

 expect much original observation of nature from a man who 

 was so devoted to books that it was recorded of him that 

 he considered even a walk to be a waste of time ! 



The writings of the classical authors, especially Theo- 

 phrastus and Dioscorides, dominated European botany 

 completely until, in the sixteenth century, other influences 

 began to make themselves felt. As we shall see in the 

 following chapter, the earliest printed herbals adhered 

 closely to the classical tradition. 



