THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 4I 



they did little to advance the science, they at least kept alive the 

 love of it, and vigilantly watched over the intellectual treasures of 

 antiquity, translating the works of the ancients and introducing them 

 into their schools. 



Early in the eighth century, the Moors, who had made themselves 

 masters ot northern Africa, induced by the representations of the 

 traitorous and apostate Count Julian, crossed the straits under the 

 command of Taric ben Zeyad, or, as he was known to the Spaniards, 

 Taric el Tuerto, or Taric, the one-eyed. Seizing the rock of Calpe, 

 this doughty chieftain fortified it as a stronghold, changing its name 

 to Gibel TariCj or the Mountain of Tarib, since corrupted into 

 Gibraltar ; and by his defeat of Don Roderick, last of the Goths, on 

 the banks of the Guadalete, ended the Gothic power, which had 

 remained unshaken in Spain for two and a half centuries. The 

 subjugation of the whole peninsula was speedily completed, and the 

 elements of botanical science, as known to the Arabs, soon spread to 

 France, Italy, Germany, and England. Abenguist, a famous Sara- 

 cenic physician and botanist, flourished about the end- of the twelfth 

 century, and superiority in the sciences was preserved by the 

 Arabians until toward the close of the fifteenth. But when, in 1492, 

 this wonderful people, gradually divested of their European con- 

 quests, lost their last foothold in Spain by the fall of Granada, they 

 seemed at once, with the departure to Africa of the the last of the 

 Moorish kings, Boabdil el Chico, to replunge into that savage 

 ignorance from which they had so brilliantly emerged. 



Arrived now at the beginning of the sixteenth century, we enter 

 upon the third great botanical epoch, which I have called the Artifi- 

 cial, being the period during which the artificial arrangement of plants 

 flourished, a period adorned by such names as Caesalpinus, Morison, 

 Ray, Tournefort, and, greatest of all, the immortal Linnaeus. 



An artificial classification differs from a natural one, in that the 

 former singles out one or more points of resemblance or difference, 

 and arranges by them without reference to other considerations, con- 

 venience and facility being the controlling principles. On the other 

 hand a natural system aims to arrange all known plants into groups 

 according to their resemblances and their degrees of resemblance, so 

 that each species, genus and order shall stand next to that which it 

 most resembles in all respects^ or rather in the whole plan of structure. 



