100 ON PLANTS. 



writings. It has been mentioned already that he probably 

 wrote a separate work on plants, but that no work on plants, 

 which can be assigned with confidence to him, has been 

 found. Such a work seems to be referred to by Athenseus 

 and Pollux, for, referring to a certain kind of date without a 

 stone, Athenaeus says : — " And Aristotle speaks thus in his 

 treatise on plants,"* while Pollux says : — " It is also written 

 in the work of Aristotle or Theophrastus relating to plants."! 



There is one and, apparently, only one work on plants 

 which might be Aristotle's own, and this is the small 

 Aristotelian treatise previously mentioned. There are 

 several editions of it, the earliest which I have seen being 

 one printed at the end of an edition of the Geoponica, 

 usually attributed to Constantine VII., and published at 

 Basle, in 1539, so it is believed. On the title-page is a 

 statement in Latin, which reads : — " Also two Greek books 

 on plants by Aristotle, which books have lately been saved 

 from destruction and are restored for the first time in this 

 edition for the use of the learned." In these books, plants 

 are divided into trees, shrubs, grasses, and garden plants, 

 such as cabbages, and also into house, garden, and wild 

 plants ; roots, bark, leaves, flowers, fruits, and other parts 

 of plants are discussed, and also plants yielding milky juices 

 and certain odoriferous plants of Syria and Arabia. It is 

 also stated that plants grown in some localities become 

 changed to other kinds when transferred to other localities, 

 like a plant called Belenion, which is injurious when grown 

 in Persia, but edible when transplanted to Egypt or Pales- 

 tine, and reference is made to some date and fig trees which 

 were said to be flowerless. 



Bef erring to this treatise, Brisseau-Mirbel says : — " In 

 the Middle Ages, an impostor dared to publish under the 

 name of this philosopher a work entitled De Plantis, a crude 

 collection of mistakes and absurdities, which nobody to-day 

 attributes to Aristotle."! The mistakes and absurdities are 

 not such, however, as to justify a belief that the work is 

 spurious, and it must be conceded that, in accordance with 

 Aristotle's own practice, there are repetitions, in substance 

 at least, of statements found in his genuine works. These 

 repetitions relate to the presence of a soul in plants, and the 

 absence of sensation or motion, the distinction between 



^= Deipn. xiv. c GG. \ x. 170. 



\ j^lemens de Physiol, veget. et de Botanigue, Paris, 1815, p. 505. 



