io HISTORY OF BOTANY 



travelled physician of Asia Minor, who compiled perhaps 

 the most assiduously studied textbook that has ever 

 been written. For over sixteen centuries its authority 

 was supreme, and, as Lee Greene says, " the greater part 

 of all the new botanical matter published during the 

 whole of the sixteenth and part of the seventeenth 

 centuries came out in the form of annotations upon the 

 text of Dioscorides." Although his work is primarily 

 pharmaceutical he recognises most of the more familiar 

 natural families of plants, and, Lee Greene adds with 

 justice and some indignation, "it is propagating fable 

 in place of history to affirm that natural families were 

 first recognised and indicated by any Linnaeus, or 

 Adanson, or Jussieu of the eighteenth century," thus 

 directly contradicting Sachs, who makes the assertion in 

 his History of Botany. 



Galen, who lived in the second century of the Christian 

 era, was medical adviser to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius 

 and also the author of a compendium of materia medica, 

 in which he advocated that all physicians should acquire 

 a knowledge of individual living plants, seeing that the 

 average apothecary was not to be trusted to recognise 

 them correctly. 



The only other name that stands out prominently as 

 a naturali st in these early years is that of Pliny, commonly 

 called " the Elder," but his Historia Naturalis was little 

 more that a popular compilation from Greek authors, a 

 hotch-potch of fact and fable, without the slightest claim 

 to rank with the works of Theophrastus and scarcely 

 even with that of Dioscorides. 



After Galen follows an absolute blank ; for more 

 than fourteen centuries botany had no history. Theo- 

 phrastus had to be rediscovered, or rather all that he 

 taught had to be relearnt, and, more important still, his 

 spirit of enquiry had to be reborn, as we shall see it was 

 in Valerius Cordus, a youthful lecturer in the Saxon 

 University of Wittenberg. The story of this young 



