THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 39 



third day God said : " Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb 



yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose 



seed is in itself, upon the earth ; and it was so." It is also recorded 



that Adam gave names to all the beasts of the fields and fowls of the 



air, and the " Blind Bard " Milton, in his " Paradise Lost," has 



beautifully and poetically ascribed a similar task to Eve regarding 



the flowers, making her exclaim, in her lamentation on quitting the 



Garden of Eden : 



" Oh flowers, 



♦ ** ******* 



* * * which I bred up with tender hand 

 From the first opening bud, and gave ye names." 



Throughout the Bible we find numerous allusions to trees and' 

 herbs, and Solomon, it is probable, wrote a treatise upon the subject, 

 for in the Book of Kings it is said of him : " He spake proverbs and 

 songs ; he also spake of trees, from the cedar-tree that is in Lebanon, 

 even unto the hyssop, that springeth out of the wall." Anything he 

 may have done in this way, however, is totally lost. Anaxagoras, 

 Pythagoras, and other ancient Grecian philosophers also wrote upon 

 plants, but their works have shared the same fate, and the poems 

 of Homer, in secular literature, afford us the only vestiges of the 

 botanical knowledge of the earliest ages. 



Aristotle included the vegetable kingdom among his numerous 

 subjects of study, and considered plants as intermediate between 

 unorganized matter and animals. Although we know that a treatise 

 on botany was issued among his other writings on Natural History, 

 about 384 B. C., all trace of it having disappeared, we may say that 

 the proper historical era of the science begins with his friend and 

 disciple Theophraslus, who, about 300 B. C, published a History of 

 Plants in ten books, only one of which, however, is now extant. In 

 this he treats of the origin, propogation, and anatomy of plants, 

 describing about five hundred species, which are divided into classes 

 with respect to their generation ; their place of growth ; their size^ 

 as trees or shrubs ; their use as culinary herbs and esculent grains ; 

 and their juices. 



Nearly three hundred years after the time of Theophrastus, or 

 about the beginning of the Christian era, another Greek, Dioscorides, 

 travelled over Asia Minor and Italy, studying plants, of which he 

 gives the names and properties of about six hundred, arranged in 

 four classes, according to their uses ; viz .^ aromatic, nutritious. 



