6 HISTORY OF BOTANY 



and the physician could be sure of their ground a botanist 

 had to be created. He was born in the person of Theo- 

 phrastus of Eresus, one of the most distinguished botanists 

 of all times. 



For nearly a generation the English student has been 

 brought up in the faith that the only History of Botany 

 worthy of serious study is that by Julius von Sachs. 

 That Sachs was a very distinguished botanist I am quite 

 ready to concede ; that he was always a fair-minded and 

 discriminating historian of his science I take leave to 

 doubt. In his estimate of Theophrastus he is singularly 

 unfortunate, as you may now judge for yourselves by 

 comparing the clear, simple, and, for the period when they 

 were written, accurate descriptions of plants and plant 

 organs in the translation of the Historia Plantarum by 

 Sir Arthur Hort, with the dull crabbed phraseology of the 

 German herbalists of the sixteenth century, whom Sachs 

 would have us regard as the founders of modern botany. 

 The truth would appear to be that Sachs had never read 

 Theophrastus ; he dismisses him in a couple of sentences 

 on the assumption, as Lee Greene cynically suggests, that 

 no one else would ever read him either. 



Theophrastus was born in Lesbos, 370 B.C., and was a 

 pupil of Plato and Aristotle. He does not appear to have 

 travelled much, but to have derived his knowledge of 

 plants chiefly from his daily observation of them in the 

 garden, near Athens, which he had inherited from his 

 friend and master Aristotle, in which he taught his 

 pupils, and in which, when his long life at last came to 

 an end, he was laid to rest. 



The Historia Plantarum and the De Causis Plantarum 

 are not long books, but at a time when all literature 

 had to be laboriously transcribed by hand authors had 

 to cultivate the virtue of brevity. Still Theophrastus 

 manages to pack into his pages an astonishing amount 

 of information ; the two volumes were indeed veritable 

 treasure-houses of facts for those who came after him. 



