162 PIIYTOGllAPIIY. 



books destitute of merit into autliority ; and die more recent 

 editors ot" his works liave not only exacdy transcribed tliese 

 citations, but have added a great many others which are to 

 the last deoTee imimportant,- — by whicli means si)ace has been 

 occupied to no purpose. It is also quite superfluous to tran- 

 scribe the speciflc character, or the description of the plant, 

 from the cited works ; but it is of the utmost importance for 

 completeness, that we should admit, without abbreviation, the 

 occasionally diffuse nomenclature of Caspar Bauhin, Pluke- 

 het, and other older writers, because otherwise we cannot be 

 perfectly certain what is the plant in question. 



252. 



The order in which citations are made, is the chronologi- 

 cal; we must therefore be sufficiently acquainted with the 

 history of the science to know the successive times in which 

 writers appeared. Some indeed reverse the chronological 

 order, by putting the most recent works first, and the oldest 

 last. But it is much more ^suitable, and is attended with es- 

 sential advantages, to begin with the oldest writers, and pro- 

 ceed to the most recent. We thus avoid repetition, and best 

 become acquainted with the earliest discoverers of plants. 



It may be asked, with what writers we should commence. 

 Linnaeus used to cite, out of the sixteenth century, only Clu- 

 sius, Dodona^us, and, although more rarely. Fox and Dale- 

 champ. He referred throughout to the Pin ax of Caspar 

 Bauhin. In later times it has been discovered, that those 

 who have been called the Fathers of Botany in the sixteenth 

 and seventeenth centuries, were acquainted with a much greater 

 number of plants than from Linnaeus^ citations could have 

 been believed. Brunfels^ Conrad Gesner, Tragus, aud Ta^ 

 bernamontanus, have for some time been more industriously 

 consulted than formerly. But to go beyond the time of 

 Brunfels, and to extend synonymes to the books of herbaceous 

 plants used during the middle ages, — to the writings of the 

 Arabians, Romans, and Greeks, perhaps even of the Jews, — 

 is as troublesome as it is useless and superfluous. We 

 justly leave inquiries of this kind to the scholar, who studies 



