198 Philosophy ok Botany. 



cuUin.2:s? With sucli aiul similar inquiries dealt Thcophras- 

 tus. They were in the main the same ones which yet in our 

 day occtipy the attention of the botanist. 



It is in the proposition of these questions, rather than in the 

 answers to them, wherein the scientific maturity of the school 

 of Aristotle manifests itself. The preparatory studies- which 

 ought to have preceded were as yet entirely insufficient. Verv 

 pointedly remarks Goethe : " If one takes a view of the prob- 

 lems of Aristotle, one is seized with surprise at the ingenuity 

 of observation and universality of attention by the Greeks. 

 Yet they fall into error from presumption, as they do, with 

 too much haste, jump from the phenomenon to the explanation 

 of its cause, whereby they construct incomplete and untenable 

 theories." Could any one of the two thousand attendants as- 

 sembled in the arcades of the Lyceum at Athens, listening to 

 the discourses of Theophrastus, have been brought to think 

 that the rearing of the scientific structure so auspiciously in- 

 itiated would soon experience a subsidence of nearly two thou- 

 sand years before the work could be continued and ultimately 

 carried to perfection as planned by its inventor? But the up- 

 heaval, political as well as intellectual, of that age was so im- 

 mense that also the stability of philosophical principles be- 

 came afifectcd. Greece and Macedonia were involved in con- 

 tinual rebellion and wars, reducing the population, laying 

 waste the land, destro3Mng the industries. Last the Romans 

 found an opportunity to settle their quarrels. A Roman army 

 under the command of Cecilius IMetellus occupied Macedonia 

 after the defeat of the strategus Andronicus (B.C. 148), and 

 two years afterwards, in a renewed campaign, the whole of 

 Attica fell into the hands of the rude and ignorant Lucius 

 Mummius. who wantonly ruined and despoiled Corinth. The 

 whole of Greece was now annexed to the Roman Empire under 

 the administration of a Roman prjptor. 



The policy of Alexander the Cireat to amalgamate, as it were. 

 Oriental and Greek culture utterly failed in the Asiatic States 

 by absorption of the Greek character into the Oriental. The 

 reverse occurred in the city of Alexandria, the capital of the 

 Ptolemeans. 



I am glad to record here an act of Alexander which embel- 



