Philosophy of Botany. '-^09 



Aiig-ustus himself was a patron of literature and science. 

 Many persons of the hi,e:hest distinction in Rome were the 

 same way inclined, and during his reign so generally preva- 

 lent was the study of philosophy that almost every statesman, 

 lawyer, and m.an of letters was conversant with the writings 

 of philosophers. The period of his reign, and of several of his 

 successors, was distinguished in cultivated taste and elegant 

 manners, going down to posterity as the Augustan age. That 

 taste continued, even under those emperors who were more 

 addicted to pleasure than to wisdom. Ultimately, in the proc- 

 ess of time, in the Christian era it went under through the 

 interminable theological strifes, and that monstrous produc- 

 tion of monkish ignorance, the Scholastic philosophy. 



The poetic and philosophic works issuing under the 

 y\ugustan palladium, entirely lost sight of the progressive, 

 because inductive procedure of Aristotelian investigation, 

 reverting to Platonic and Epicurean sublimities, groping 

 after the ideal, obscure, and unknowable, treating with con- 

 temptuous neglect those obvious realities out of which later 

 generations were destined to construe a higher civilization. 

 Many sublime but fruitless conjectures are aA^owed in the 

 classics of that time. Thus Virgil, in the fourth Georgic, de- 

 rives the origin of things, after the Stoics, from a divine prin- 

 ciple pervading the whole mass of matter: 



His qnidani slgnis etqiie haec exempla secuti, 

 Esse apibus partem divinae mentis, et haustiis 

 Aethereos dixere: Deum namoue ire per omnes 

 Terresque, tractusque maris, coelumque profundum. 

 Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum, 

 Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas. 

 Scilicet hue reddi deinde, ac resoluta, referri 

 Omnia, nee morti esse locum, sed viva volare. 

 Sideris in nunierum atoue alto succedere coelo. 



— IV. Georg"ica' (Yiio'il). 



Led by such wonders, sages have opined 

 That bees have a portion of a heavenly mind; 

 That God pervades, and, like one common soul, 

 Fills, feeds, and animates the worlds great whole; 

 ! That flocks, herds, beasts, and men from him receive 



Their vital breath; in him all move and live; 



