iv] Aristotelian Botany 117 



of medicine and natural history. Cesalpino (Plate XIV), 

 it is true, was largely concerned, like the herbalists, with 

 the mere description of plants, but the fame of his great 

 work, ' De plantis libri XVI* (1583), rests upon the first 

 book, which contains an account of the theory of botany 

 on Aristotelian lines. 



Cesalpino's strength lay in the fact that he took a 

 remarkably broad view of the subject, and approached it as 

 a trained thinker. He had learned the best lesson Greek 

 thought had to offer to the scientific worker — the knowledge 

 of how to think. He had, however, the defects of his 

 qualities, and his reverence for the classics led him into an 

 inelastic and over literal acceptance of Aristotelian con- 

 ceptions. The chief tangible contribution, which Cesalpino 

 made to botanical science, was his insistence on the prime 

 importance of the organs of fructification. This was the 

 idea on which he chiefly laid stress in his system of classifi- 

 cation, to which we shall return in a later chapter. 



A botanist who had something in common with 

 Cesalpino was the Bohemian author, Adam Zaluziansky 

 von Zaluzian (1558 — 161 3). His most important work was 

 the ' Methodi herbariae libri tres,' published at Prague in 

 1592. As a herbal it does not rank high, since Zaluziansky 

 neither recorded any new plants, nor gave the Bohemian 

 localities for those already known. But it opens with a 

 survey of botany in general, which is of interest as showing 

 an approach to the modern scientific standpoint, in so far 

 as the author pleads for the treatment of botany as a 

 separate subject, and not as a mere branch of medicine. 

 His remarks on this point may be translated as follows : — 

 " It is customary to connect Medicine with Botany, yet 

 scientific treatment demands that we should consider each 

 separately. For the fact is that in every art, theory must 

 be disconnected and separated from practice, and the two 

 must be dealt with singly and individually in their proper 

 order before they are united. And for that reason, in order 

 that Botany (which is, as it were, a special branch of 

 Physics) may form a unit by itself before it can be brought 

 into connection with other sciences, it must be divided and 

 unyoked from Medicine." 



Guy de la Brosse, a French writer of the seventeenth 



